In my previous post I looked at site registration and viral methods to attract more vistors to your site. In this followup post, I shall look at another two methods; namely PPC (Pay Per Click) Schemes and Organic Search.
###Pay-Per-Click Schemes
Traffic can be directed towards your website through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) schemes. Such schemes are run by various operators and work by syndicating adverts for your site amongst participating partners. The incentive for the partners to display your advert on their site is that the PPC programme will pay them a set amount for every advert clicked. The recipient site then pays a fee to the provider for every advert clicked.
Perhaps the most popular of the PPC schemes is Google’s AdWords. This offers fine control over where and how your adverts are placed, allows you segregate your adverts into individual campaigns and lets your control the overall spend on each campaign. Both Yahoo and Microsoft have recently started to offer competing services.
Whilst PPC scheme can guarantee a steady flow of traffic to your site, it does so at a cost. It is therefore important to budget for this, to avoid overspending on advertising. This can be achieved by working out the completion ratios for site traffic to conversion goals, or supplement the PPC spend with another form of income, such as site advertising through PPC schemes.
###Organic Search
After reviewing the previous three methods to attract site traffic, we are left with organic search. This is the method by which most of us find new content on the web. Organic search is the term used for content retrieved from search engines. As the growth in the number if Internet sites have increased, so has the need for the search engines to filter and rank them. By providing good, well structured content on your site your rankings in the search results can organically increase and your site attract more users.
This “organic” search traffic is therefore important to any website. By following some simple rules to optimise your website for search engines, ensure all your content is easily and correctly indexed. This will in turn promote your site in the resulting rankings.
It should be noted however that there is no sure-fire fix to create a top ranking site. The best method is to follow what the search engine writers are looking for - quality, relevant and unique content. By focusing on this, rather than any SEO trickery, will help you reach the rankings than any other method.
###Conclusion
In this brief over view I’ve discussed the main ways of attracting traffic to your site. Of these methods, the best most cost efficient, long term solution is to promote organic search results. Over the course of the next few weeks I shall be exploring some simple methods by which to achieve this, and providing some live examples.