Organic Traffic Defined; and Why You Want It

By Darrel Hawes

"What is organic traffic?" is a question many new website owners and marketers often ask. For this question there is a simple answer: organic traffic is visits to your web page that are not directed 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 a couple basic strategies obtaining organic traffic.

The first is getting incoming, also referred to as backlinks. These are links on related sites that direct people to yours. This tactic assumes that people in your target market will bump into a link to your web page and and select it. The link may come from a directory, forum, static website, or blog.

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 are slightly different for each search engine, but the steps generally taken include: getting backlinks (a separate strategy on its own that is relevant for SEO purposes), keyword density, proper page names, and a proper site map.

There are many benefits of good SEO implementation. There's free traffic, the traffic doesn't require pay-per-click account management, and if it's consistent it can form the foundation 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.

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