If a website page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly (especially if there is other competition on the first page). Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that go to subsequent pages is substantially lower.

Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines is as important as the website itself.

There are a number of other things you can do to Increase Website traffic, including but not limited to building link popularity, webrings, offering free e-books or articles and classified advertisements.

Of the above mentioned items, perhaps the easiest one to do is building link popularity. This can be accomplished by writing e-mails to sites similar to yours and asking if they would link to your site. The second way of increasing your website traffic is writing to e-zines or to free article sites.

There are many sites which will accept your written material, the catch is that you are giving it away for free. The benefit, however, is that you get to include a link to your site in the article, meaning every time someone clicks on your link, it brings free traffic to your site. Pixel ads can bring traffic to your site but usually will not get you a targeted audience.

Organic traffic

Website traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as "organic" traffic. Organic traffic can be generated or increased by including the website in directories (such as Yahoo! and DMOZ), search engines (such as Google and Inktomi), guides (such as yellow pages and restaurant guides) and award sites.

In most cases the best way to increase website traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Just registering does not guarantee traffic, as search engines work by "crawling" registered websites. These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the website (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page URL and the page title. In most cases they also index the website page header (meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance according to the search engine algorithms.

Usually, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from website users. According to some studies, the top result gets between 5% and 10% of the clicks. Each subsequent result gets between 30% and 60% of the clicks of the previous one. This indicates that it is important to appear in the top results. There are some companies which specialize in search engine marketing. However, it is becoming common for websitemasters to get approached by "boiler-room" companies with no real knowledge of how to get results. As opposed to pay-per-click, search engine marketing is usually paid monthly or annually, and most search engine companies cannot promise specific results for what is paid to them.

Because of the huge amount of information available on the website, crawlers might take days, weeks or months to complete review and index all the pages they find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over eight billion pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of pages, a complete reindexing takes its time. That is why some pages recently updated in certain websites are not immediately found when doing searches on search engines.

Natural Traffic

Natural website traffic is also in some cases attributed to the name of the website, particularly when the website uses a primary dictionary term as it's domain name. Common sense suggests that we can go to "Shoes.com" and shop for shoes online. One does not need to go to a search engine to find that URL. In the past many valuable names were simply undeveloped and you might see "under construction" or "free parking" listed, however today, many high profile domain names are in use, and therefore increase the website surfer's belief they can go directly to a site based on its name. Another example is "Porn.com" which sold for 9.5 million dollars due to the ability to save on search engines and likelihood to attract visitors by name. Another example might be "BankRate.com" in which a bank rate might be found immediately. Other examples include cultural oddities such as "BavarianDancers.com." As all domains that represent a topic are likely registered, a visitor can find what they are looking for by typing in the topic.

For that reason the domain name market is considered to be a very big factor in not only obtaining traffic, but especially in creating a name that is easily remembered. eLoans, is easily recalled, as will be the new domain name purchased by CNN "iReport." It is possible that millions of people will log on to report news if that brand becomes a household name.

Another means of natural traffic is to tap into other network websites that already has a lot of traffic. Video sharing websites, social sites, forums and network groups websites provide many unique website visitors as they have their own visitors viewing each others works. Free website submission to these sites thus play a important role to increase website traffic.

Paid advertising

In return for a small payment many larger companies choose to advertise their sites on other popular sites. This e-marketing usually takes the form of:

* Banner advertising: Banner impressions are sold by the thousands, and referred to as Cost Per Impression (CPM). As of 2004, prices range from $1/CPM for a run-of-network to about $50/CPM or more for specialized targeted runs.

· Pay per clicks: Advertisers "buy" keywords or keyphrases by bidding on them against other advertisers. These Pay-per-click providers sell space on the respective search engines and sites with which they are aligned. Position is largely determined by a combination of the amount each advertiser is willing to pay and the click driving performance of the advertiser's creative - though advanced providers such as Google have started taking into account other factors such as the quality of the ad's destination and the ability of the site to satisfy visitors. Google sells paid advertisement through its AdWords and AdSense systems, which place sponsored links on search pages. Overture, now owned by Yahoo!, is one of the most popular pay-per-click advertising venues.
As users got used to seeing banners, some companies chose to make the advertisements more intrusive - pop-up ads became particularly popular to attract attention. However, most people consider pop-ups a nuisance and several software companies offer free pop-up blockers. Microsoft included a pop-up blocker in Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.

Traffic overload

Too much website traffic can dramatically slow down or even prevent all access to a website. This is caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle and may be an intentional attack on the site or simply caused by over-popularity. Large scale website with numerous servers can often cope with the traffic required and it is more likely that smaller services are affected by traffic overload.