We all are aware the ever increasing use that we make of search engines in our daily life. We have become accustomed to finding relevant things at click of button. We are being pampered by improving technology of search engine algorithm.

It is estimated that 76% of Web users performed at least one search in January 2004. This meant a total of 114 million web visitors to search sites.

Here is another one.

Sixty four percent of Web users employ search as their initial method of finding things.

As the web grows, more and more people join the bandwagon and search engines can’t help smiling. They are in good business.

As a web businessperson, one must take into account the large role being played by search engines and gear their website for that.

A traffic from search engine can come in following ways

Organic Traffic

This is the traffic from the results displayed by search engine naturally, depending upon the relevancy. These results are called Organic or Natural Results. They are based on natural algorithm of search engine and are influenced by that only. If your site comes in top listings, you get tons of free traffic. Search engine optimization is the specialty that explores how a page can rank high for organic search results.

Organic search is the most common search in web user’s mind and web searchers tend to click organic search results two out of three times .There is inherent inclination to trust organic search results because people think them to be a neutral opinion.

Organic search, and traffic results from it are what you should be aiming at and this must be part of your search marketing. It may take time to succeed, but is very rewarding in the end.

Paid Search Traffic: Most of the search engines also show a sponsored listing along with organic results, either at top or in side (see image). Your position would depend on your bidding in your pay per click campaign and competition on your keyword. Your bidding guarantees you a display when the search term you have bid upon is entered. This method does not take relevancy in account and the results are solely guided by search term.Another method of paid search traffic is to pay for inclusion in a search engine index so that your web site is displayed along with other relevant sites. However, this method only guarantees inclusion and not listing. That would still depend on relevancy of search term. Many small search engines run this kind of paid inclusion. There might be variations of terms from search engine to search engine.

Another source of paid traffic is search directory. Though this is not a web search in pure sense because searching a directory would reveal results within its own content, but many people do visit directories in order to find things. Directories classify the Web sites according to each subject category that describes them and are maintained by human editors. Getting listed in a directory could bring a good amount of web traffic.

In contrast to organic traffic, paid traffic is instant source of traffic. But it comes at a price.