If you have a website or run any kind of online service, you will quickly realise (whether or not you run a business service) that getting visitors to come to your site is one of the main measures of online success. The larger the number of visitors you receive (generally referred to as traffic or web traffic) the more viable and successful your site can be (in the same way that a supermarket without visitors in dead or dying – except of course that the amount of resources you need to commit to get your site online are much smaller).

There are many ways to get online visitors to visit your portal, but not all of them are ideal ethical or reliable. The main ways you can get traffic to your website are via paid traffic or through organic traffic.

Getting people to visit your site through paid means is straightforward and involves either creating adverts that are placed on other websites or displayed by search engines when people search for similar items on the Internet with a search engine.

In most cases as with Google’s Adwords, you only pay when people click on your adverts, however depending on how competitive your niche is, this can be quite an expensive means of gaining traffic as the amount you have to pay depends on a bidding system which means you bid against other marketers for the right to display your advert in a top position.

Generally, the higher up your adverts appears in search engine pages, the more likely they are to be clicked on. Experienced marketers can make a huge amount of profit from variations of this such as adword arbitrage.

Most marketers get traffic organically by ‘natural’ means.
You can’t really talk about organic traffic without understanding the role search engines play in bringing or delivering traffic to your web site. Organic traffic is basically web visitors who are delivered to your site by search engines after a search.

When people type words relating to an item, service or information they are seeking into a search engine, the search engine lists in order of relevance web pages relating to that information or relevant to that search. The more you can make your page and your whole website relevant to that search, the higher your page rank and closer to the top of the search engine result pages (SERP’s) it appears.

Now you could possibly write very informative page crammed with information on your topic, but there is no guarantee that search engines will list it anywhere near the top for your keyword. What you need to to is optimise your page – a process called SEO or search engine optimisation.

A huge amount of time and effort has gone into and goes into optimising sites but the important factotsrs are:

Content: Your web page content must be relevant to whichever keyword you are trying to target or optimise for. Google has has become extremely good at finding which words are related and often appear together e.g. shoe, boot, sandals
Links: Search engines use the number of pages that link to yours as an indication of how popular your page is, and traditionally has ranked your page on this basis. Because, pro SEO experts have gone overboard in getting hundreds of thousands of links to point at pages, Google has now updated its search engine to penalise what it calls ‘unnatural links’ i.e. links created with the sole intention of boosting rank – you should learn about how to avoid being penalised for building links to your website.
On-site optimisation: These are the things search engines examine on your web page, things you can tweak to make your page optimal such as your page title, use of bold lettering, internal linking of pages together, using videos in your page, external links

An important point to note is that if your site is flawed from the beginning, nothing you do may be able to get you traffic, so you need to carry out keyword analysis of your keywords before you even start your site e.g. if you build your website to target a keyword or topic few if any people are searching for.

You can learn every thing you need to know about building and optimising your website to get lots of traffic from this very comprehensive video and ebook program: Read our review of Affilorama Blueprint

If you use wordpress, you can also install this great SEO plugin which helps you include video, text and images, internal and external links to your web site etc. from within your admin panel. The great thing about this is that it both tells whether you are under or over optimising your site: Read our review of PushbuttonSEO

If you want to analyse your keywords so you set your website up from scratch to target the right keywords then you can use a free tool Traffic Travis. Click here to find out how Traffic Travis can help your enterprise build traffic.

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