Organic Traffic Defined; and Why You Want It

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“What is organic traffic?” is a question many new website owners and marketers often ask. For this question there is a simple answer: organic traffic is visits to your web page that are not directed there by a paid advertisement.

It’s referred to as organic because the owner did not pay for the visitor to be directed to his site. Rather, the visitor discovered the website via a search engine or a link from another site.

Getting good organic traffic is normally looked upon as desirable because traffic can be generated 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 known as Search Engine Optimization; SEO for short. The idea is to take certain actions to rank as high in the search as possible, using keyword important to your market. The three biggest search engines nationwide are MSN, Yahoo, and Google. It’s best to focus on those three, in order, starting with Google.

SEO strategies are slightly different for each search engine, but the steps generally taken include: getting backlinks (a separate strategy on its own that is relevant for SEO purposes), keyword density, proper page names, and a proper site map.

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.

There are drawbacks, too. Organic traffic may be unpredictable, the search engines may alter their ranking procedures, rending up to months of work useless, and the time it takes to draw in a decent level of traffic may be a long while.

And yet, no matter your business model, if you intend to keep your website for any length of time, you would certainly consider the process of seeking traffic via search engine optimization.

Tags: Web