Traffic

Traffic is perhaps the most important thing for you to focus on with your website.  You must have an audience or you have no market.  Web traffic is simply the visitors who arrive at your site.  There are many methods for pushing visitors at your website that fall under two primary methodologies — Paid Traffic and Natural Search.  Another word for natural search is organic traffic, or traffic that your site would naturally receive if you weren’t promoting it.  

With Natural Search, there are logical patterns to how people will respond to your website, and that’s what Google looks at when they are assessing the relevancy of your traffic.  For example, if you are a florist, it won’t benefit you to have a link from a zoo as much as it would to have a link from a comment in a bridal blog.  And it won’t benefit you to have a link from a brand new bridal blog with no traffic as much as it would from a bridal blog with 100,000 visitors a month; the latter is what is known as an “authority” site, and links from relevant authority sites should be crucial to your Natural Search program.

That last phrase may seem a little strange — a “Natural Search program.”  Well, it is a little strange.  The pattern of traffic to your website should be natural, but with the millions of pages of content in your niche, if you simply publish a page and then wait for it to be found “naturally,” it will take years (if ever).  So when you are notifying people of your wonderfully written page, please keep in mind the relevancy factor.  

Paid Traffic is oftentimes referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) because a big part of it comes from Google Adwords or similar small ads placed on Search Engines.  However, paid traffic can be found in many sources — banner advertising, ezine placement, social media advertising, etc.  Paid Traffic is an integral part of one’s marketing arsenal.  However, a big mistake many web owners make is launching a site and then immediately launching a paid campaign.  It’s more prudent to research your market, know your target keywords, create relevant content in a specified structure, test the organic search efficacy of those keywords, work on the quality score of your web pages, and THEN launch your paid campaign.  The investment of work and time could potentially save you thousands of dollars in paid traffic costs — and result in higher conversion.

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