Are you new to online marketing? Or are you one of the millions of frustrated website owners watching helplessly as your site fluctuates up and down (even on and off) the search engines?

Is your traffic suffering as you try to stay on top of the most current methods of finding traffic, only to find that they are ineffective for bringing targeted traffic or stop working soon after the search engines catch on?

There is a reason that staying in the search engines is vitally important. The amount of people who are searching for information online is increasing rapidly.

An Ipsos-Reid poll showed that people are starting to rely more heavily on the internet with increases in the frequency of internet usage in North America the UK and Asia. At the time of the poll 72% of Americans were online within the previous month, and that number continues to rise.

How are they finding information on the internet?

According to research published by GVU (Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center), most users - novice, expert, young, old, male and female - find new websites from two main sources: hyperlinks and search engines.

Pew Internet & American Life Project also published statistics about search engine use which indicated that "84% of online American adults have used search engines. That amounts to 108 million people. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines."

How many of these potential visitors are finding YOUR website? More websites are created each day leading to increased congestion and competition for the top spots in search engine results. How are you able to compete? Well first of all, how do search engines bring you traffic?

Two of the most popular methods of getting traffic from search engines include PPC - Pay Per Click - and SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

PPC: Pay Per Click is advertising provided by the search engine providers (Google, Yahoo! and others) where you PAY for top placement. Their strategies for placement differ slightly. Some search engines will give you higher placement if your ad has a higher click-through rate (meaning more people click on your ad in ratio to the amount of times your ad was shown), others give top positions to the highest bidder.

In either case, you PAY. It is a quick way to get listed in the search engines and a smart way to get your traffic flowing - but it is not the cheapest AND you could spend far more than is profitable for your business if you don't know what you're doing.

SEO: There are a lot of companies working 'behind the scenes' to help website owners get plenty of traffic from the natural search engine listings. Natural listings mean the search engine has ranked you according to the value it believes your site will offer an individual searching for a specific word or phrase.

Understanding exactly WHAT the search engines want to see when ranking sites requires knowledge of the algorithms. These algorithms change all the time as search engine providers try to outwit the search engine optimizers trying to find loopholes in the ranking system.

Some SEO companies will promise you top spots for a certain cost. Some are honestly creating optimized websites - others may be using techniques that could possibly get your site BANNED from the search engines entirely (once the search engine catches on). However, optimizing your website for better placement in the search engines is a technique that you should become familiar with and use to your advantage.

Both of these traffic methods have their pros and cons for generating traffic from the search engines. You will find out more about using them properly later on. But first you need to know what REALLY works...

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About the Author

Dr. John E. Neyman, Jr. builds, maintains, coaches others how to build their contact lists. Most know that the "gold" is in the list. mailto:[email protected]