Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Organic Traffic Defined; and Why You Want It

By Darrel Hawes


New website owners and marketers often ask what organic traffic is. The simple answer is: organic traffic is visits to your web page that do not originate from a paid advertisement.

It is called organic because the website owner did not pay for that specific visitor or for a specific ad to draw the visitor to the site, but instead the visitor found the site either from a search engine such as Google or via a link on a website directory or another site.

Getting good organic traffic is universally desirable; after all, it's a generation of traffic without incremental cost, or effort.

There are two basic strategies for getting organic traffic.

The first of these is getting incoming links, also known as backlinks. These are simply links on related sites that point to your site. This strategy assumes that people in your target market will stumble across the link to your site and click it. The link may originate from a website directory, blog, forum, or static website.

The second strategy is SEO; that is, Search Engine Optimization. With this strategy you take steps to rank as high in the search engines as you can using the keywords that are still important to your business. There are many search engines, but it's commonly a good idea to focus on Google, Yahoo, and MSN; in that order too, seeing as they're the top three search engines nationwide.

SEO tactics vary a little from search engine to search engine, but the steps taken are generally the same. These include: keyword density, proper page names, a proper site map, and getting backlinks (a different strategy on it's own that is still relevant for SEO purposes).

There are many benefits of good SEO implementation. There's free traffic, the traffic doesn't require pay-per-click account management, and if it's consistent it can form the foundation of a revenue stream that can be sold.

The drawbacks of focusing on SEO include: organic traffic can be somewhat unpredictible, the search engines can change their ranking rules, rending months of work useless, and it can take some time to develop a decent level of traffic.

Regardless of your business model, if you intend to keep your website for any length of time, you would definitely consider seeking organic traffic through search engine optimization.

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