Organic Traffic Defined; and Why You Want It

“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.

It is called organic because the website owner did not pay for that specific visitor or for a specific ad to draw the visitor to the site, but instead the visitor found the site either from a search engine such as Google or via 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 tactics for receiving organic traffic.

The first is simple: getting incoming links, also called backlinks. They’re links from related web pages that link to your site. This strategy makes the assumption that people in your target market will see the link to your site and click on it. The may be in a website directory, a forum, blog, 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).

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.

These are the drawbacks of focusing on SEO implementation: the search engines can change their ranking rules, rending all your work useless, organic traffic may be unpredictable and can take some time to develop in the first place.

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.