As a website owner, you have one thing in common with every other website owner. You need traffic. Getting traffic to your website is considered the one thing that can make or break your business by many business experts. Without people visiting your site (i.e. web traffic) you will never get them to buy your product, or click your link, or sign up for your newsletter.

The need for website traffic is obvious. What’s not as obvious is how to get it. Experts each promote their own formulas for getting 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 methods are fads. Some are shady. Others only work in certain countries. But in the end, most website traffic really comes down to these two kinds: free (organic) traffic, or paid traffic.

Some experts argue that free website traffic doesn’t exist. They maintain that all website traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” in the same way most people use the term search engine 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. It can come from natural links on other sites. Organic traffic can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. Maybe they heard about your website from a relative, in a magazine article or on a radio ad. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. They are also usually free in the sense that you don’t pay directly to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.

Paid traffic is just what its name says. It is internet traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be priced by the click from pay-per-click programs like Microsoft Adcenter. It can be from a banner you purchased on a third-party website. It can be from when someone types in your website url from a paid print ad in a magazine or newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay for traffic.

So the question is, which is better? Many would say that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free (natura) traffic also can take some time to get. For example, when you first create a website, how many people know about it?. So initially, 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 takes time to spread. When you buy an ad, you can usually start getting website traffic immediately. Even though paid traffic costs money, you can usually pay a lot less than what you make. In that example, purchasing an ad 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 non-optimized site, carefully create a pay-per-click ad campaign to acquire immediate traffic. Monitor your paid traffic closely at first. Especially test which keyphrases are most profitable. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, tweak your site’s pages for the high value key phrases and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to specific pages on your site. Within several months, you will be dominating both the paid and natural traffic sources.