SEO Recap – Paid Traffic Options

Naturally, the aim of all your SEO efforts is to drive traffic to your website. The primary goal is to build a website that is thoroughly optimized to bring you free traffic (organic traffic). However, while you are trying to get off the ground, get your entire site indexed, and start getting that great organic traffic, you may want to explore some paid traffic options.

Some webmasters believe that using tedious SEO strategies to get traffic trickled into their website is just too much trouble, they would rather get the required traffic to their website by paying for that traffic. This is one approach, and if you can make a profit then paid traffic may be an option you want to lean on. For most, however, paid traffic is only a part of their website traffic, while the concentrate on building up organic results.

There are several  ways of getting paid traffic to your websites, and some of them are more effective than the others. If you opt for paid traffic, it may take some trial and error to find out what options work for your website and which do not so that you don’t spend your money on traffic generation approaches that do not work. The best way to verify working approaches is to try 2 at a time, and see which works better (split testing). You will have to track your outlay and ROI carefully.

Ways to get paid traffic:

• 1.    Pay per click programs such as Adwords. Pay per click programs are one of the most popular forms of getting paid traffic, and Google AdWords is usually the best although there are competitors. This is also one of the most cost effective ways of getting paid traffic to your website.
• 2.    Banner ads are one of the oldest ways of driving traffic. Many factors such as your business vertical, pagerank and visitor traffic rates of the hosting site will affect your actual cost for this kind of paid traffic. Banners on websites that are not relevant to your own will only waste your money, so choose wisely.
• 3.    Paid links can be obtained from directories or high traffic websites or in other ways – be sure you no-follow these to show Google and other search engines you aren’t trying to artificially boost page rank.
• 4.    Affiliate programs can be launched to increase traffic to and business on your site; since affiliate programs are performance based, you will be paying your affiliates only for the successful sales made so your only outlay is tied to your incoming sales.

Using two or more methods will let you see what works and what doesn’t. Pay per click programs works for almost all business verticals, and you can control your budget, but the paid traffic strategy that you use will need to suit your website, your product and services and also depend on your budget for website promotion.

The main disadvantage of depending solely on paid traffic is as soon as you stop your ad spend results stop too. On the other hand, optimizing your website for organic traffic will yield results for years with minimal maintenance. Check with your SEO firm to see how much you could actually save with an organic traffic building program!