As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Website traffic is considered the most important thing by many internet gurus. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) your website will fail.

The need for website traffic is obvious. What’s not as obvious is how to get it. There are as many different techniques and philosophies on how to get 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 barely legal. Others only produce traffic in certain niches. But in the end, most traffic really comes down to these two kinds: free (natural) traffic, or paid traffic.

Certain SEO gurus say that free traffic is a myth. They say that all internet traffic costs you something – whether time, effort or money. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” as a synonym with natural traffic. Natural traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not buy outright. Natural traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from search engine results like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Natural traffic can come from incoming links. Organic traffic can come from someone entering your website address directly into their browser. They may do this if they hear about your website from a relative, in a magazine article or on a radio show. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. These forms of traffic are free in the sense that you don’t pay someone directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.

Paid traffic is just what its name says. It is website traffic your website gets because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Yahoo Search Marketing. It can be from an ad displayed on someone else’s website. Paid traffic can be from when someone types in your website url from an ad you bought in a newspaper. There are many other scenarios that you can pay to get traffic.

You may be wondering which way is better? At first glance it may seem that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free (natura) traffic takes time to establish. For example, when you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will put links on their site to yours. Major search engines don’t know about it either, so your site will never show up in the search results. Even word of mouth sdvertsing takes time to spread. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting traffic immediately. If you do it right, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that example, paid traffic is a lot better than waiting months or years for your site to become profitable.

When it comes to a traffic strategy, the smart choice 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 unadvertised site, carefully construct a pay-per-click ad campaign to acquire initial traffic. Gauge that traffic closely at first, and run some split tests to determine what works best. Especially test which keyphrases are getting results. Refine your campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, start optimizing your site’s pages for the high value key phrases and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to landing pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and free traffic sources.