Its About Traffic Honey

If you are a webmaster, what do you hope to gain from your websites? If your answer is anything other than traffic, all is not well in your paradise! Naturally, there can be other valid webmaster''s ambitions such as developing your site into an authority site, or generating revenue (can''t fault that one). But, the backbone of authoritative websites is traffic ? lots of it. Relevant traffic. Traffic that converts. Traffic that is natural.

But where can we find traffic? The first school of traffic generation relates to the fundamental dictum of "build a good mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door." Of course there is bound to be significant doubt about what characterizes a "good mouse trap." But the idea has its merits. If you already have a good website, and can promote it, you will be able to generate traffic.

Yet, it is sad that instead of following the principal of "build a good mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door," some website owners rely on "build and they will come." This is the passive approach to website traffic generation. Sure, it is not as though you will not get any traffic, but you are leaving a lot of money on the table. And that is not a good thing. Instead of dispersing your skills over several sites, you must apply yourself to only as many sites as you can actively promote. Sounds like a bunch of common sense, right? Actually, it is not so common to see this basic principle being followed.

Then there are those who will buy traffic. Ask a webmaster and usually they will find the idea of buying traffic abominable. The reason for this is that the sites that sell traffic do it by using paid surfers, auto-surfing programs, pop-ups, pop-downs, etc. This finally reduces the quality of the traffic till it becomes nearly good-for-nothing*.

Of course, an amazing solution for traffic is search engines. In case you can get search engines to rank you decently, you can expect to get adequate traffic from search engines. But apply yourself to only the few big ones ? Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask probably constitute well in the excess of 90% of all search engine queries. Having good content on a fantastic site, great navigation and many links from reputed sites is the best way of ranking well in search engines.

The author recommends Online Opportunity, Squidoo, and Search Engine Optimization Overview.