You will find no shortage of opinion on what is the best way to generate traffic to your website. The one thing all the experts agree on is that without sufficient traffic, you will not have a business for very long. So you will have to do your own research on which will work best for you! We can safely conclude that there are two main methods to generate the necessary traffic:

1 Organic Marketing

2 Search Engine Optimization

In order for you site to be a success, people must be able to find it, usually by the use of a search engine. More and more people are using these search engines, typing in a few phrases or words and then choosing from the results, and moving on until they find something that interests them. Most of these people have only a very basic idea of what they are looking for, or how to find it.

Your website, to be successful, needs to be found online by people typing in a search phrase related to your site. To have this happen, your site needs to be relevant to the search criteria, and this is where search engine optimization comes in. Designing your site effectively, as well as entering special coding, will help your website attract the attention of search engine spiders, which the engines send out to crawl over all websites they can find, and index their pages according to their content.

These spiders will look at many other aspects in their search, such as how many other websites have links to your site, the popularity and relevance of these linking sites, the content on your site, and the number of visits your site generates. However, the criteria used to rank sites vary among different search engines, and so there are no hard and fast rules to be used, despite what a guru may claim.

Many webmasters try to cheat the spiders, often by putting in code to their site that bears no relevance to the content of the site, which can result in the person doing the search getting results that are completely irrelevant to their search. This is frowned upon by the search engine companies, as it results in their customers being annoyed, so they will try to penalize any site they think guilty of this.

Many webmasters become frustrated, as often they are not able to reach the top 40 in search results, despite thier search engine optimization efforts. This is where organic marketing can come in. It's just another way of promoting your business, but with a more human touch. Many businesses follow this form of marketing, claiming that it is people buy products and services, and not computers, so no one is really worried if the spiders are kept happy or not. By following the broad guidelines, website content is kept relevant to the search terms to help the site rise to the top of the rankings.

In general, search engines will seek quality content in the form of text, ignoring fancy graphic designs, and language that refers only to how the message is delivered, as opposed to the actual content of the message itself. Keep your content consistently focused on both the customer and the search engine's hot spots, and your business will grow nicely.