How to Get Traffic to Make Your Server Groan.

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.

There are many aims of advertising. Advertising may be geared towards building a list, selling a product, or even just to brand the website. Always track your traffic to make sure that your objectives are being achieved

It's always important to be able to see the difference between the alternative traffic sources. Pay Per Click ads are invariably cheaper to buy when placed on a Content Network as opposed to a Search Network. This is because your ads on the Search Network are directly triggered by someone typing in a search term so can be viewed a more targeted.

People who click on ads on the content network tend to be browsing the Internet for information. In most cases, they expect to get this information for free. On the other hand, those searching for key terms, especially product names, are more likely to be looking to buy. Because of this, conversion rates are typically much higher on the search network. This leads to more demand which, in turn, leads to higher prices for these ads.

As a short term way of getting traffic pay per click is very effective but careful watch has to be kept on the cost of this traffic and conversion rates as it is very expensive. Without proper tracking unprofitable campaigns which seem to be profitable are just going to drain the budget. Organic traffic, i.e. appearing high in the search results which is in effect free traffic is the best way to go but unfortunately takes longer. Search Engine Optimization is required here: This is the process of optimizing web pages to get high positions in the search engine results. This is a long term answer to Traffic and initially should be done alongside pay per click.

One technique to overcome this problem is to aim for 'low-hanging fruit'. That is, keywords that have less competition. While these generate lower traffic, it is possible to build up considerable amounts of traffic by building up a portfolio of less popular keywords.

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.