Free Traffic Vs Paid Traffic

Traffic coming to a site can be divided broadly into

• Free Traffic - Traffic from Search Engines and networking sites.
• Paid Traffic - Traffic from paid advertising programs and other softwares.

For real and longstanding results,free traffic is more preferable.Because this kind of traffic comes from people who want your content or products or have similar ideas as you do and want to share the information.These people won't mind to come back to your site (if your content is good) time and again to read your posts.
Paid traffic on the other hand,comes from people who are forced to see your pages.Your pages go to them,they don't come to your pages.Of course if your site is smart enough,they would not mind bookmarking it.But this happens rarely because people hardly read unexpected sites which come before them like pop ups and pop unders etc.Even if they bookmark your site for the moment,it is unlikely that they would take a serious second look at your site.

Free Traffic can be further categorised as

• Referral Traffic - Traffic generated from Social networking sites like Mybloglog,technorati.
• Traffic from Search Engines.
• Traffic generated from Link exchange.

Referral traffic is constant but Search Engine traffic is more diverse and can expose your site to more visitors.But if your site is not there in top 10 pages of the search engine results,it is impossible that you get traffic from the search engine.So you should tune your site friendly enough to search engine so that it can find you out easily.This method is what is called SEO.
Search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders” that visit websites from all over the internet and gather information regarding web pages that are searched by the people. This is otherwise known as having your website crawled.
After crawling the WebPages on your site, the gathered content is stored in a huge searchable database of documents which make up the search engine’s “index”. The search engine arranges this information in various searchable fields, so that when a queried the search engine can scan billions of documents and completes this in fractions of a second.
To make your pages search engine friendly, you have to

1. Tone your keywords and smart usage of keywords.
2. Interlinking of pages of your site.
3. Toning the Meta tags - though it is said that meta tags are dead,some search engines still use meta tags and meta tags are of great help for social book marking and networking.

Link Exchange is a very good means for generating serious readers only if the exchange takes place organically and not through softwares or by thrid parties.Exchanging links from similar sites as yours brings people who are actually interested in your site.These people in no time form your inner circle of readers.Once relationship is established between readers,it is easy to publicise your site.