How to Get Great Traffic to Your Website

by David O Connell

More Search Engine Optimization Articles

Published on this site: April 28th, 2010 - See more articles from this month

In Internet marketing, there are essentially 2 major ways of building traffic on a website. There are the free methods which consume time and energy and offer a continuous stream of visitors with little or no upkeep, and there are paid methods such as cost per action and cost per click advertising that only offer ROI based on how much money you are willing to trade per visitor or per lead. Both methods can be profitable, but in general, they can be broken up into three major categories:

1. SEO Traffic
   
   Search engine optimization traffic consists of traffic that comes to your site strictly by ranking high in the search engine results. What is the number one way to build your rankings in the search engines and guarantee that you will get visitors from Google Yahoo and MSN? Keyword targeted back links. Having your site linked by relevant websites within your niche, preferably with a high page rank or a higher page rank than your own website are essential in this process, but content also greatly improves your odds of getting ranked high as well.
   
   This method is essentially the cheapest for people who can not pay for things like Adwords or CPA marketing. If you need visitors but can not afford to pay a whole lot to get them, you should really utilize SEO traffic as one of your primary resources.
   
   
2. Back link Traffic
   
   Back links are essential for search engine rankings, but they also serve as their own source of quality traffic when utilized appropriately. Essentially what this means is building an image to visitors on other websites by building articles in directories and other websites or blogs. Videos on sites such as Youtube, and relevant and helpful posts on popular forums within your niche. This is another great free method of traffic generation you can utilize if you are trying to build traffic to a website, but do not have enough money to outsource it or go with pay per click methods.
   
   
3. Paid Traffic
   
   For successful e-commerce and marketing websites that have a high conversion rate and are profitable enough to afford it, paid traffic is another excellent technique for building traffic to a website. Paid traffic consists of just about any form of traffic you can get by paying cash up front to the provider of this traffic. This covers pay per click, pay per action such as form fills and lead generation, and even alternative forms of paid traffic such as pay per tweet or pay per 1000 impressions types.
   
   Paid traffic is usually the most expensive but highest quality traffic you can acquire. Targeted traffic converts better than not so targeted. Someone who clicks on a relevant ad in Google is probably going to be a hungry buyer, which is why Google often charges top dollar for each click in a competitive niche and screens the websites strictly for irrelevant and unwanted content.
   

If you are considering PCC you should learn a bit about it before you start.

David O Connell: 120 Website Super Traffic Generating Strategies explores both online and offline high traffic techniques:
http://www.websitetraffic-hitlist.com/.