Organic Traffic
Organic traffic
Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as “organic” traffic. Organic traffic can be generated or increased by including the web site in directories (such as Yahoo! and DMOZ), search engines (such as Google and Inktomi), guides (such as yellow pages and restaurant guides) and award sites.
How Organic Traffic works
In most cases the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Just registering does not guarantee traffic, as search engines work by “crawling” registered web sites.
These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as “spiders” or “robots”.
Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page URL and the page title. In most cases they also index the web page header (meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance according to the search engine algorithms.
Usually, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from web users. According to some studies the top result gets between 5% and 10% of the clicks. Each subsequent result gets between 30% and 60% of the clicks of the previous one. This indicates that it is important to appear in the top results. There are some companies which specialize in search engine marketing. However, it is becoming common for webmasters to get approached by “boiler-room” companies with no real knowledge of how to get results. As opposed to pay-per-click, search engine marketing is usually paid monthly or annually, and most search engine companies cannot promise specific results for what is paid to them.
With the huge amount of information available on the web, crawlers might take days, weeks or months to complete review and index all the pages they find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over eight billion pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of pages, a complete re-indexing takes its time. That is why some pages recently updated in certain web sites are not immediately found when doing searches on search engines.*
*Courtesy of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Value of Organic Traffic
So how do you spread the word that your Web site is there and start attracting the right traffic to your site? One approach is to market the site heavily by splashing your URL via ads all over the place (paid), this works but can be quite costly. Another way is to generate traffic organically. Both paid Web site marketing efforts and efforts to generate organic traffic have their benefits, but leveraging the long-term benefits of organic traffic can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful Website. Organic traffic, as the name implies, is traffic that comes to your Web site naturally and without being driven there by a specific marketing campaign. That is, Web site visitors are there because they found the site and thought it had something they wanted. Like all things organic, organic traffic isn’t there instantly, it takes time. Organic traffic happens in much the same way as you browse the bookshelf at your local library or bookstore for something of interest. After searching a while you find that little treasure that contains all the answers you’re seeking. Sources of organic traffic include:
- Links (referrals from other Web sites)
- referrals from search engines
- URL’s placed on letterhead, business cards, etc.
Paid Web site marketing has the advantage of driving traffic immediately to your Web site. This is great for launching a site, or for a special promotion. Sources include (but are not limited to):
- Newspaper magazine and TV ads
- Purchasing of banner ads on other Web sites
- Launching a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign,
- Distributions of mass emails and press releases
- Pay per click (PPC) advertising
A secondary benefit of paid Web site marketing is that when done properly, it can assist in laying the seeds for organically generated traffic.
Organic or Paid: Which One Is Right for My Site?
Choosing between organic or paid isn’t a black-and-white issue. First you need to examine your budget and the benefits you’ll get for your effort. Even with a modest budget, launching an SEM campaign to start driving traffic can be made possible. This is something to strongly consider when working with an ecommerce site and you want to begin making sales immediately.
For well under a dollar per click, you may purchase keyword-based ads through Overture or Google Adwords. This enables you to drive traffic immediately, which increases the possibility of a sale, this also allows you to buy time until organic traffic kicks in. If you already have some organic traffic, a paid campaign can give you an immediate boost as well. One common mistake is relying solely on paid techniques and ignoring organic traffic. While you have the attention of web site visitors via your paid campaign, use this opportunity to extract the seeds for your organic operation. One technique is start encouraging web site visitors to link to you from their sites, affiliate programs are a great incentive to grow the number of links to your site.
By running an SEM campaign, you may also pull contacts from your web site access logs. While you might have purchased some single keywords or two/three keyword combinations, 38% of all searches are of 3 or more words (Jupiter Media). This means that while you have purchased the phrase AB (for example), the person who clicked on your ad actually searched on ABXY or BXAC etc. By extracting these terms from the access logs, and determining which phrases actually turned into a successful visit (sale/lead/other), you are now aware of which terms need to be emphasized, and which ones to remove from the Web site. You need to optimize your site for the search engines.
We will review your Web page title tags and make sure they are unique and contain the appropriate keyword phrases.
Next are the description meta tag. Often these are missing or so poorly written that they may actually hinder ranking well in a search engine.
We will examine the content of your Web page to be sure those keywords/phrases are there in the content. Are they there in the text? If you’ve used a clever graphic of the words, this will not help; the bots that search engines send out are blind to graphics and ignore (or discount) image alt attribute values.
If you’ve used graphics for navigation, replace the same links as plain text at the bottom of your page. If there are used graphics for section headings, the graphic needs to be and replaced with an H1 or H2 tag (search engines give great value to words contained in H1 or H2 tags). Naturally, you will need to set up an appropriate class in your cascading style sheet to emulate the existing design. If you’ve built your site entirely in Flash, there really isn’t much you can do beyond the meta tags.
Once you’re ranked well in the search engines, you can reap the benefits of the organic traffic. Some people tend to think of organic traffic as free traffic as apposed to paid traffic. However, there is a lot of work involved in sowing the seeds of organic traffic and time spent has a cost. That said, once the initial work is completed you’ll be essentially receiving traffic for free. Now don’t let your site go unattended for long; you’ll need to monitor it periodically, watching for a drop-off in traffic, and continue to make small adjustments to keep the organic traffic growing.
If you can’t wait upwards of four months for your listing to appear, and have the budget many search engines like Yahoo offer paid inclusion. While this is a paid-for click service, paid inclusion doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a top ranking for the site. It simply gets you in the index quickly, usually within 72 hours, and comes with guaranteed revisit frequency (we’ll re-index your site every 48 hours). The advantage of this is simple. You can continually tweak your site for better ranking. One bit of good news (from Yahoo at least), is that if you decide not to renew your paid listing, you won’t get dropped or banned from their listings, though this may not be true for all search engines.
So now you can help drive traffic to your site. Remember, building a site that no one sees has zero value for your business. A Web site that gets traffic and generates revenue or sales leads is a very valuable tool that will generate more corporate attention, and presumably a larger budget.
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