An online business website that depends on promotion and sales needs a good search engine marketing strategy to be successful and profitable. Generating targeted traffic to the website is the main function of a search engine marketing strategy.

A variety of different traffic building methods and techniques can be used to attract traffic to a particular website. One such widely used methods of search engine marketing that is used by online businesses to generate traffic is “pay per click”. Pay per click is an acceptable method used to attract traffic to your websites, however it is important to monitor it frequently to determine its efficiency in generating traffic that is beneficial to the project.

There are many businesses find paid campaigns prohibitively expensive and a drain on their already scarce resources. Such companies can opt for free campaigns that work on targeted marketing. SEO or search engine optimization is a free traffic generating campaign that is a part of search engine marketing. However, it too requires a lot of research and constant monitoring to produce the desired results.

The keywords selected for SEO need to be relevant to the website concerned and also to the users queries. For search engine optimization to be effective in attracting traffic the websites should be listed in the first few pages.

Pay per click is more effective in pulling traffic as it lists websites on the first page of the SERP.

The quality of the traffic pulled is also of a high order. The only reason why businesses don’t use it is because it’s too expensive. However there are ways to reduce the cost of PPC so that businesses do not overshoot the budget. One way is to minimize the cost is to use less popular keywords. Although they generate relatively less traffic it is sufficient to meet the requirements of the website in question. Another smart way is to bid on misspelled keywords. It does sound strange but the fact is that too many visitors make typos on search engines. This weakness of visitors can be used to your advantage and attract some more traffic to your website.

Installing link exchange system is also recommended. In this system you have non-competitive websites link to your websites. This way you generate more traffic to your website from partner websites. Having professionally written articles related to your business also helps, the articles pose problems to visitors and offer your company’s name as a solution thereby increasing the traffic.

Updating articles on a weekly basis makes your website rich with content encouraging visitors to come back again and again and also visitors are more likely to recommend your sites to their friends and associates, thus increasing the traffic to your website. Distributing your articles throughout the net helps as more and more people are aware of your company’s product and thus increasing traffic to your website.

Only 3 – 6% of all the websites on the World Wide Web are correctly optimized, even though thousands of websites are launched by businesses and individuals every day. The only way to stay visible on the Internet is to have an effective SEO strategy.