Yadabyte SEO Primer 3: Traffic

We have some sites that we use for testing (or that we bought and never used) that are not connected to the internet. They sit there, not getting any traffic except yadabyte traffic. Google doesn't know about them. Nor yahoo. Nobody does really. These sites have zero web presence. That's what a new site is like.

So.. lets suppose you have a new website. Its built, its beautiful and it works exactly how you want it. If you now do nothing, your site will stay with zero web presence. It will have no visitors. It will not be found by google or yahoo. It will languish in a lonely internet solitude. Your new site nmeeds traffic.

You or someone needs to get it traffic because, as said, it wont happen by its self. Its pretty daunting with a virgin site... or just a quiet site to answer the question, "How can I get traffic?". And in essence this is what this series is all about; getting traffic to generate web presence so you can get more traffic.

I think a good vantage point to look at traffic is from a distance. Looking from here there are three ways traffic can come to your website:


The Three Types of Traffic

1. Search Engines - Most successful sites get most of their traffic from search engines. This is an irrefutable fact of the internet right now. Your site will need to generate search engine traffic.
2. Hyperlinks - Hyperlinks made the internet possible and they are still its prime matter. Hyperlinks not only allow people to come to your site from another site, but as we saw in the last section, they largely determine a site's web presence.
3. Address Bar Traffic - This is where someone enters your website's domain name in their browser and visit the site. That much is simple, but tehre are endless reasons why they might have done this. maybe they saw your ad in the paper, on tv, maybe a happy customer wrote it down on a beer mat. Maybe they saw your car decals. Some sites have lots of Address Bar Traffic (www.yadabytewebsites.com) others get hardly any (www.yadabyte.com).
   

Thats it.

There is no other way (I count email based links as hyperlinks) to get traffic to your site.

In the next post in this SEO Primer we will look at search engines as "things" so that you can understand their workings without much mystery. Following that we start to get into the mud and muck of search engine optimization, link building and, if we have time, how to get to the top slot in Google for the search phrase "yadabyte SEO primer".


Yadabyte SEO Primer 4: Mommy, what's a search engine? will be published shortly.