If you own a website, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Getting traffic to your website is considered the most important thing by many internet gurus. Without people visiting your site (i.e. web traffic) your website will fail.

The need for website traffic is obvious. The real question is how to get it. Experts each promote their own formulas for getting 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 short-term. Some are shady. Others only work in certain niches. But all website traffic eventually comes down to these two kinds: free (natural) traffic, or website traffic you pay for.

Some experts argue that there is really no such thing as free traffic. They maintain that all internet traffic costs you something - whether time, effort or money. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” in the same way most people use the term natural traffic. Organic traffic is website traffic that you did not directly pay for. Organic traffic can come from lots of places. It can come from search engine results like Google, Yahoo or Bing. It can come from natural links on other sites. It 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 published article or on a radio ad. All of these forms of traffic are natural 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 works differently. It is website traffic you receive as a direct result of paying for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. It can be a click from a banner that you paid to have displayed on someone else’s website. Paid traffic can be from from someone entering in your website url from an ad you bought in a magazine. There are several other ways you can pay to get traffic.

Which method 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. When you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will link to your site. Major search engines don’t know about your site either, so you won’t be displayed very high in the search results. Even word of mouth (often called viral marketing) can take a while 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, purchasing an ad is a lot better than waiting months or years for your site to become profitable.

If you now think paid advertising is better - hold on. The wisest path 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 new site, carefully construct a pay-per-click campaign to gain instant traffic. Gauge that traffic closely at first. Especially test which words and phrases are leading to conversions and profits. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and eliminate the duds. Then, start optimizing your site internally for the profitable key phrases and get some incoming links using those profitable keywords and phrases as the hyperlink to specific pages on your site. Within several months, you will be well-positioned in both the paid and free traffic sources.