As a website owner, you have a shared need with every other website owner. You need traffic. Website traffic is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many marketing experts. Without visitors to your site (that’s what internet traffic is) your website will fail.

The need for website traffic is obvious. The real question is how to get it. There are as many different ways to attract traffic to your website. 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 ideas are short-term. Some are suspicious. Others only produce traffic seasonally. But the majority of website traffic really comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or traffic you buy.

Certain SEO gurus say that free website traffic doesn’t exist. They maintain that all internet traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” as a synonym with natural traffic. Organic traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not directly pay for. Organic traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Organic traffic can come from incoming links. It can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Perhaps they heard about your website from a friend, 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 works differently. It is any traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Microsoft Adcenter. It can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on a different website. Paid traffic can be from from someone entering in your website url from an advertisement in a magazine. 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. In many cases it is. But free(organic) traffic also can take some time to get. You see, after 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 your website exists either, so your site will never show up in the search results. Even word of mouth sdvertsing can take a while to spread. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting visitors to your site right away. Even though paid traffic costs money, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that scenario, paying for your traffic is a lot better than waiting months for your site to become profitable.

The best strategy, however, 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 get immediate traffic. Gauge that traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which keyphrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, tweak your site internally for the money keywords and seek out link partners using those profitable keywords and phrases as the anchor text to specific pages on your site. Within a few months, you will be getting lots of traffic from both the paid and organic traffic sources.