There Is More To Winning Traffic Than Plain Old SEO
As you travel around reading various ‘experts’ on winning traffic, you may feel that search engine optimization (SEO) is the only way to go. SEO is only one method to attract traffic and its chief aim is to rank well in the search results to generate ‘free’ traffic. There are many other ways of generating traffic, some more successful than others.
Advertising: Advertising has long been the center piece to attracting customers. It has worked in the off line world for centuries and still has its place, even in an online world. The down side to online advertising is that, just like the television, unless the advert really stands out, people can blind to them.
Audio/Video: Web 2.0 brought in the audio and video era and many businesses find they can do very well by creating entertaining ads and parking them in public sites such as YouTube. If the video is clever, other site owners, particularly bloggers may broadcase the video for you – at no cost.
PPC: Pay per click (PPC) advertising is the life blood of search engines like Google. PPC advertising has its supporters and detractors. Well planned campaigns can generate good sales. However there is also the problem of click fraud where publishers ‘arrange’ for ads to be clicked.
Affiliates: One method of promotion that has been around almost as long as the internet is affiliate advertising. In this model, you get your affiliates to do all the SEO work, win all the traffic, and finally deliver the customers to your door.
Social Media: The latest alternative to search engine optimization is social media optimization. Rather than looking to rank well in search engines, you are looking to spread your name/brand through social sites such as Facebook and Myspace and many others. For professionals, sites such as Linkedin have proven to be quite successful.
Of course, you may just have a brand that needs no promotion. Your site will get linked to by the masses simply because of that brand. If you were to check out some of the leading brands in the soft drink and fast food industries for example, some of their sites are 100% flash with no SEO components at all. They still rank well in search results.
Having said that SEO is not the be all and end all to winning traffic – if you were to include some basic SEO strategies in each of the above models you would find that over time your search engine rankings would climb naturally anyway. SEO is not the only game in town, but if you play it right you can still gain some of the benefits.
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