Trends in Traffic Generation

There are two main types of traffic :

Search Engine Traffic - This type of traffic comes from search engines such as Yahoo, MSN and Google. The good thing about it is that it is free, highly targeted and usually helps direct quite a lot of traffic. The not so good thing is that it you can’t control it. You rely on robots to analyze and deliver the traffic to your site, and it is short term.

Referred Traffic - This type of traffic comes from a third party mostly a human source, some examples being forums, banners, article directories and partners. The good thing is that it is can be controlled, it is highly targeted and it is long term. The not so good thing is that it is time consuming, and it is repetitive.

Today it seems that webmasters mostly rely on traffic coming from search engines. However, the correct manner in which to get traffic as the new school of thought recommends is to not use search engines, since search engines give a narrow view in regards to traffic generation, and so one will not be able to see the opportunities that exist outside of search engines in order to generate traffic. You will also not be able to control the traffic if you use search engines and that does not work too well in marketing. The use of search engines to generate traffic should not be your priority. It may be better to focus on referred traffic, as discussed above, in dealing with traffic generation.

If you use referred traffic you will have long term control on your traffic and it can be manually generated rather than by a robot. You can submit content to your feeds, be active in forums and blogs, and even exchange links if you use the referred traffic method. Another way you can use referred traffic is to submit the sitemap of the site to MSN, Google, Yahoo, etc. especially since Google and most search engines make changes to their algorithms on a daily basis in order to produce content that is relevant for the users of their various engines.

When you build referred traffic to your site, you are assisting search engines so as to be able to index your site, rank and understand your site in a better way, and therefore developing search engine traffic as well in a natural manner.