If you are in it for the money-E-Commerce, gathering leads or advertising your offline store, your site's life-blood is Qualified Traffic.

Let's start with "Qualified". To me "Qualified" for Pepsi may mean all current drinkers of that venerable drink as well as all Coca Cola drinkers. That's pretty much anyone I have ever met. In fact, even if you only drink milk, Pepsi brand building may yet convert you from a lactarian to a Pepsierian. Incidentally, my site is likely to rank high on the term Pepsierian, given I seem to be the first person to use that term. Pity, no one ever searches for this term. More to the point, if they were to search, I wouldn't be able to sell them anything, or convert them since I would have no clue what a person searching for this term is actually looking for. Well, you get the idea.

So, for sites like Pepsi where the target is everyone and their grandparents, one measure for traffic is "Daily Reach". In the case of Pepsi it is about 150 people per million according to Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=http://www.pepsi.c om/home.php ) . It's also the 13000th most visited site in the world. By way of comparison, Coca Cola is the 9000th most visited site with just about 200 people per million. Google is 3rd, with a daily reach approaching 300,000 per million. Say, one in 3 users of internet uses Google at least once daily.

Not bad! At this point, we will ignore how easy it is to manipulate Alexa rankings and why a certain type of site ranks higher. The point is, all the rankings have to be taken with a grain of salt. More on that in a future article, when we discuss phenomena like "Google Bomb". We will also discuss the motivation behind cheating.

Of course statistics like "Reach Per Million" are awfully depressing if your site is about the problems faced by Inuit community in Congo. That community (as far as I know) is so small that even if your site was an "Authority" on that subject, you wouldn't get very far.

The "Inuit Community in Congo" example is pretty contrived. So, how about a real site? What are the steps that we need to take to build some real traffic? Broadly speaking, we get traffic from the following sources:

1> Search Engines: The search engine displays your site as the most relevant for the search term. This can be a result of your site ranking high on the search engine due to it's ranking, relevance and popularity, bringing "Organic" visitors to your site. It could also be because the site owner pays the search engine, usually on a "per click" basis.

2>Affiliates: These are other websites that act as a front for you, or which display your advertisements, or the latest fad of "Pre sales pages". These can be banner or textual advertisements. The affiliates websites usually expect a percent of sales("Pay per action") or charge a fixed amount per month. They direct their traffic your way, and are compensated through a pre-arranged agreement. Some of the affiliate sites have lots of context sensitive contents. For example, this affiliate tickets selling site, http://www.ticketnest.com is chock full of information about various bands and theatrical events.

3> Email Advertising: This works well in some cases. However, this channel is often abused by spammers and is beyond the scope of this article.

4> Offline Advertising: This includes newspapers, TV, radio, magazine advertisements, exhorting people to visit you.

5> Offline brand: We didn't hear about Pepsi from their website. It's hard to imagine, but there was a time when we were drinking that stuff but had never heard of the world wide web. Too bad, my 11 month old son would never be able to say the same. The offline brand of WalMart may convince users to visit their website.

Let's focus on the "Organic" visitors (users that visit the site via Search Engine Optimization or SEO Efforts) . It's easy to segment these visitors in the same class as "Offline brand" visitors since there is no cost associated with them. No affiliates to share profits with, and no search engines to pay per click. There is also no "Click Fraud" or "Affiliate Fraud" to worry about. Also, many people tend to trust "Organic" results more than PPC results.

So what is the single most important factor in getting people to visit your site? To answer that question, let's turn to some interesting statistics. It so turns out that 69% of people don't navigate beyond the top five sites returned by a search engine. More importantly, 91% of the visitors don't look beyond the top twenty sites. In other words, if you don't rank in the top 5 of the keyword of your choice, it is likely that you are left to pick from just 31% of the traffic. And if you don't rank in the top 20, you are just viewed by the pickiest 9%. To convince these people to buy, you best have a very good product, price or value. The old real estate adage of "location, location, location" is just as true in the WWW virtual real estate.

In other words, the easiest sales are made if you rank in the top five. Sadly, this is not a secret and therefore ranking in the top 5 is exceedingly difficult for competitive keywords. Ranking the site high for some keywords has given rise to a new profession: SEO or Search Engine Optimization. These professionals called as Search Engine Optimizers sometimes treated with deference given to demi-gods and witch doctors. While, other times, when they can't produce the results they are treated like charlatans, quacks, snake oil salemen-with contempt.

The job of an SEO company is to focus on what key phrases will get you the most qualified traffic, write web copy("on page optimization") using those search terms(or keywords) , design the navigation of the site ("site navigation optimization") as well as convince complementary sites to link to the site in question. The expected outcome of all this running around is to convince the search engines that your site, and more to the point your "landing page" is the most appropriate one for certain keywords.

What are the possible problems with hiring an SEO?

Cost:

It is quite a bit of work and that unfortunately gets pricey. The formula really is quite simple: how much is the qualified traffic worth to you. Say, you have been paying 50 dollar /click through your PPC campaigns and given your conversion rates you just break even with an averge of 100 visitors a day(50 dollar/day). In order for you to consider SEO's service, the SEO should get you visitors at a sufficiently lower cost. However, the difference is that there is an immense amount of initial work which tapers off with time. The SEO fee should taper off once you feel comfortable with your position so that you are just paying a "seo maintenance fee" just to defend your position.

Lack of performance guarantee:

All good SEO firms tell you the same thing. They don't control the search engines, so they can not, and will not guarantee results. Some firms however, do offer a money back guarantee.

Skullduggery:

Well some SEO's are just plain crooks who will use "off-book" tactics to reel you in and use black hat tactics like cloaking and spamming to attempt to fool the search engines. It is important to research your SEO company thoroughly. These devious tactics more often than not, get their clients' sites banned by the search engines. A case in point is the European site of BMW, which got banned by Google.

Considering whether an SEO campaign is what you need? How about a free Search Engine Optimization consultation

For more information about Search Engine Optimization visit: http://www.sofizar.net/search-engine-optimization.php