What is Organic Traffic?

Answer:
Website owners can drive visitors to their sites through

paid marketing strategies, or they can spend time establishing reciprocal links, registering their site with search engines and promoting their website's URL using real world materials (business cards, letterheads, print ads, etc). Website visits prompted by links, search engines and personal interest are considered organic traffic, and can be vital to a website's long-term survival and monetization.

Much of the success of the entire World Wide Web phenomenon can be traced directly to early organic traffic. The first websites depended on reciprocal or non-reciprocal links, search engine rankings and word-of-mouth advertising to generate almost all of their traffic, since very few if any marketing companies offered paid online traffic-generation services. Even today, the goal of many commercial websites is to have much more organic traffic than paid traffic. Visitors who find a useful website through traditional search or link methods tend to remain more loyal to that site than those who were directed to the site through contextual links or other paid advertising methods.

Organic traffic takes significantly more time to generate, but the end result is often a more reliable customer base or a solid collection of repeat visitors who bookmark the site. Paid website promotional programs are good for generating a lot of traffic and attention in a short period of time, but many web surfers rely more on a website's popularity among peers and the quality and usefulness of its content. Organic traffic generation can be time-consuming for website owners, but many of the best resources for organic site promotion are either free or very inexpensive. Paid traffic generation can be very expensive for the website owner, and the results may be decidedly variable over time.