One of the easiest ways of getting traffic is to get your credit card and spend some money on Adwords (or similar) campaigns. The problem with this is that although they drive traffic to your website, people always prefer not to spend money, specially in this times.

The other way of getting lots of traffic to your website is well known for all of us: positionate your web page in search engines, so when people look for a term or sentence, your page appears voila, you got a visit with no money spent at all.

In fact there are other ways, think on social networks, think on friends/related sites linking to you, and a laaaaarge etcetera…

Anway, let’s talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization, SEO for friends). This is one of those things which is easier to talk than to do, because doing it right requires its work.

I’m not really the best person to talk about it yet, because I’m starting to investigate and learning about this SEO techniques. The good thing about these techniques is that they are almost “free”, meaning that you don’t have to pay to a third party like google for placing ads in their ads-network. On the other hand, these techniques require work, and the work requires time. If you are doing it for yourself, think that your time is not free. If you have people working for you, you already know that their time is not free, so looking it this way, applying these techniques is not totally free, but anyway, nothing in this life is free at all… doesn’t it?

Returning to the main topic, once you have done your job on SEO, you will improve the number of visits that come to your site without spending that much money, and you have to think that someone comming from a pay ad is not worth the same as the one comming from a search engine. The second one is more valuable.

The other day I was reading a statistic where it said that between 80% and 90% of the people clicks on a link that appear on the 10 first links of a result page. You don’t need to be smart enough to notice that if your website appears on the third or fourth result page of a search engine, you will only get a really small percentage of the potential visitors you might have. And better not to talk about appearing on the 10th result page….

Searching a little bit (around 10 seconds), I’ve found the following chart, very ilustrative:

I’ve borrowed this chart from an article titled: Clickthrough rate of Google Search Results

Impressive! The first link on a search result page gets no less than the 40% of all the visitors! But it does not stop here, because if you get the overall percentage of the three firsrt positions, they represent more than 60%!!!  The first 5 positions represent more than  70%

Thinking about it we will see that there are hundreds of thousands of webpages for only the 30% of the users searching for a term.  In fact is worse than that, because I don’t think a page in the position 100 will get any meaningful clickthrough.

Conclussion:

If you want to have lots of visitors you either spend your money or you work hard