Organic Traffic; What It Is and Why You Want It
New website owners and marketers often ask what organic traffic is. The simple answer is: organic traffic is visits to your web page that do not originate from 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.
Getting good organic traffic is normally looked upon as desirable because traffic can be generated without incremental cost or effort.
There are a couple basic tactics for receiving 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 tactics vary a little from search engine to search engine, but the steps taken are generally the same. These include: keyword density, proper page names, a proper site map, and getting backlinks (a different strategy on it’s own that is still relevant for SEO purposes).
The benefits of good SEO are many. First of all, the organic traffic is free. Also, if it’s consistent, it can form the basis of a revenue stream that may 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.
