Free Traffic or Paid Traffic

With the prevalence of the Internet throughout the globe, many people are now looking to market their products and services online. However, the most beautiful web site will generate revenue unless there is traffic directed to it. There are a couple of options to obtain website traffic. One is through free traffic and the other one is through paid traffic. Let's examine the differences between the two. You can then decide whether the former or the latter is a suitable choice for your website.

Free traffic, as the name suggests, implies that you get traffic to your website without spending a single dime. The most common method of obtaining this involves using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. When you optimize your website, search engines view your site as being useful and relevant. This in turn, leads to increase in rankings for your chosen keywords. SEO methods are great for obtaining free traffic in the long term but it might take as long as six months to a year to see full results. Alternatively, you can use strategically written articles and get them published at article directory sites that have high volumes of traffic. This works to bring in organic search engine traffic within a week. Free traffic can also be obtained through various traffic exchanges.

The other option of getting visitors to your website involves paying for traffic. If you need quick and immediate traffic to your website and have some advertising budget, paid traffic is a good option. The most common and immediate method of obtaining paid traffic is through pay-per-click listings with all the major search engines like Yahoo, Google and MSN. Depending on the amount you are willing to spend as well as your target keywords, pay-per-click traffic can bring in some of the best results due to precise targeting of visitors to your site. However poor planning can lead you to spending loads of money without any decent returns.

The best option is to use a combination of both paid and free traffic. Optimize your website to bring you traffic over the mid to long term as well as to position your website really well in the search engines. For the short term, getting your traffic through a combination of paid searches and article marketing. In time, you will be able to obtain almost all of your traffic for free and you can slowly phase out of your paid traffic options.

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