Everyone who has a website wants more traffic. However, not all traffic is created equal. Many people get so caught up with driving traffic to their website they forget to check whether it is working towards the actual goal of the website.

Websites use advertising for different reasons. A global brand such as Coca Cola would more than likely just be strengthening the brand whereas another site may be directly selling a product or building a list. It’s important to remember to track all traffic to make sure that it’s serving it’s purpose and valuable advertising dollars are being well spent.

In some cases, it is easy to see the difference between various traffic sources. For example, it is usually much cheaper to buy Pay Per Click (PPC) ads for a content network than for a search network. On a content network, ads appear on related web sites while on a search network they appear as the result of a user keying in specific search terms.

You will tend to find that most people who click on ads placed on the content network tend to be browsers looking for information rather than people looking to make a purchase. People who type in specific search terms in the search network tend to have done most of their research and are more likely to be ready to buy a product. because of this there is much more demand for the search network which means a higher PPC cost.

Pay per Click advertising is fine as a short term solution but careful control over costs must be kept and also conversions have to be tracked avidly or costs can outstrip revenue which then defeats the objective. The better but more long term solution to traffic is seo or Search Engine Optimization which when done properly can get the website high up in the organic search results for relevant keywords. seo means optimizing individual web pages for certain specific keywords using on page factors such as keyword density and off page factors such as inbound links. This is a more long term solution to Pay Per Click which is virtually instant. Initially a good balance need to be found between the two.

Its very hard to rank highly for more generic keywords especially in popular niches where competition is fierce so aim for long tail keywords or “low hanging fruit”. There are lots of good keyword tools to help you find these and they are much easier to rank for so if you can build a significant list of these and optimize your pages accordingly you will get ranked and also get significant traffic from these.

Other good forms of generating free targeted traffic include article marketing, email marketing and utilizing joint venture partnerships. The main thing is to avoid traffic generation strategies that cost money, but don’t result in conversions.

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