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As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Getting traffic to your website is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many internet experts. Without visitors to your site (i.e. web traffic) you will never get them to buy your product, or click your link, or sign up for your newsletter.

Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different formulas for getting traffic to your site. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).

Many of the methods are trendy. Some are black-hat. Others only produce traffic in certain countries. But the majority of traffic essentially comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.

Some experts argue that free traffic is a myth. They maintain that all website traffic costs you something – whether time, effort or money. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” in the same way most people use the term organic traffic. Organic traffic is website traffic that you did not directly pay for. Natural traffic can have many different sources. It can come from search engine results like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Free traffic can come from someone clicking on a link found in a different website. Natural traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. They may do this if they hear about your website from a relative, in a published article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are natural traffic. They are also usually free in the sense that you don’t pay directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.

Paid traffic works differently. It is incoming traffic you receive as a direct result of paying for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. Paid traffic can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on a third-party website. Paid traffic can be from from someone entering in your website url from an ad you bought in a magazine or newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay to get traffic.

Which method is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free(organic) traffic can take a long time to get. For example, when you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, no one will link to your site. Major search engines don’t know your website exists either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) takes time to gain momentum. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting website traffic immediately. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that example, paying for your traffic is a lot better than waiting years for your site to become profitable.

If you now think paid advertising is better – hold on. The wisest path is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a new site, the first step is to construct a pay-per-click ad campaign to get immediate traffic. Gauge this ppc traffic closely at first. Especially test which keywords are most profitable. Refine your campaign to include more profitable words and delete any keywords that aren’t priducing results. Then, optimize your site’s pages for the high value key phrases and get some incoming links using those profitable keywords and phrases as the anchor text to relevant pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be dominating both the paid and free traffic sources.