Organic Traffic; What It Is and Why You Want It

Many new marketers and website owners ask, “what is organic traffic?” The simple answer is: visits to your web pages that are not moved there by a paid advertisement.

The reason it is called organic is because the owner of the website did not pay for an ad to draw the visitor to the site, but rather the visitor found the site himself, either through a search engine like Google or a link on a website directory or another site.

Good organic traffic is desirable because it requires no incremental cost or effort.

There are two basic strategies for getting organic traffic.

The first is simple: getting incoming links, also called backlinks. They’re links from related web pages that link to your site. This strategy makes the assumption that people in your target market will see the link to your site and click on it. The may be in a website directory, a forum, blog, or static website.

The second strategy is SEO, or search engine optimization. This strategy simply means you take certain steps to rank as high in the search engines as possible for the keywords that are important to your business. There are many search engines, but the focus is generally placed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, in that order, as the top three search engines worldwide.

SEO strategies may change a little from search engine to search engine, but the steps taken are usually the same: keyword density, obtaining backlinks(a seperate strategy, but still relevant to SEO purposes), proper page names, and a proper site map.

The benefits of good SEO implementation include: free traffic, traffic doesn’t require managing a pay-per-click account, and consistent organic traffic can form the basis of a revenue stream that can be sold.

The drawbacks of focusing on SEO include: organic traffic can be somewhat unpredictible, the search engines can change their ranking rules, rending months of work useless, and it can take some time to develop a decent level of traffic.

Regardless of your business model, if you intend to keep your website for any length of time, you would definitely consider seeking organic traffic through search engine optimization.