Here are the four other sources of traffic that are most commonly used when proper SEO isn’t in place.

Banner ads

Only 2% of visitors to any website come from a banner ad. They usually cost money to place and many of these visitors are not targeted. There shouldn’t be a lot of effort wasted on banner ads.

PPC marketing

Approximately 16% of website visitors arrive at a site through ads placed on Google and other search engines. It is an expensive proposition to run a marketing campaign on Google and most people hire a PPC management company to do it for them.

Social marketing

About 5% of the visitors to a website come from a social marketing site like Twitter or Facebook. Social marketing is an important part of any business’ web presence, but it simply does not compare to natural SEO.

Text ads

These are ads that could be placed in a classified ads directory, on other sites or at the bottom of articles sent out. These ads only bring in about 0.5% of all visitors to websites across the world. There has been a lot written about article marketing, but while it does have its place, it should not be counted on to bring in a lot of traffic. It is best used for backlinking.

Natural SEO

There is nothing that can compete with organic SEO and probably nothing ever will. Proper SEO will bring in about 77% of the traffic to websites across the world. The only way that you can compete with the big guns out there is to have your site ranking near the top of Google. You can use the other sources of traffic, but don’t forget about the one that will give you the highest traffic volume.

In other words, 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customer base. Similarly, 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customer base — and it’s probably NOT the same 20%. This has led to, among other things, a sudden focus on reducing your customer base as a valid business strategy — just make sure you cut the customers that create problems, not the ones creating the profit.

In the world of SEO, this is also true on a large scale. It turns out that of all of the money spend on Search Engine Marketing each year, 80% of it is spent on pay-per-click marketing, and only 20% is spend on organic SEO. Conversely, of all of the traffic that flows through Google and it’s competitors, 80% of it is organic (i.e. it comes from the actual search results and not the PPC ‘sponsored placement’s.) The other 20% is pay-per-click traffic.

So, 80% of the money results in 20% of the traffic — and 20% of the money results in 80% of the traffic. By my math, that makes every dollar you spend on SEO some sixteen times more valuable than each dollar you spend on PPC. That isn’t to say that PPC doesn’t have it’s advantages — instant traffic is more useful in terms of cashflow than traffic that doesn’t come for a few weeks or even months down the road — but sixteen times? That kind of efficiency can buy a lot of patience.

Of course, there are options to dramatically improve the payoff of pay-per-click marketing. Many SEO companies are offering PPC management services that can quadruple the effect of PPC — so it’s only one-quarter as efficient as SEO. Still, unless you absolutely can’t wait for the traffic, SEO is probably your better option.

If you spend 100 hours over a month and the website doesn’t meaningfully improve it’s rankings in that time, you’re clearly doing something wrong. On the other hand, if you’re seeing huge results for that 100 hours, you need to know what you did right so that you can repeat it for other sites in the future!

There aren’t a lot of studies done on this kind of thing, but around here we’ve noticed that two activities consistently seem to be pretty much the LEAST time-efficient things to do: forum posting and social bookmarking.

Now why would an SEO company talk about how bad it is to purchase two of their services? Because, as you might have guessed, I’m about to flip the script on you.

You see, by combining forum posting and social bookmarking, you can create side benefits that far outweigh their value in terms of improving your rankings directly. Both of them engage a very powerful force that most SEO gurus will rarely ever mention: communities.

Communities are groups of people online who gather to talk about a specific topic. If you’ve ever been part of a message board devoted to a single topic — whether it’s ‘Elements The Game’ or ‘How To The Economy’ — you know how rabid the posters on a dedicated forum can be. They also generally have a place where you can post links to stuff you like or whatnot.

Social bookmarking sites, on the other hand, have Vote buttons that allow you to give something a positive bump. Get enough votes, and your link might make it into some list of daily, weekly, or monthly Top X in a given category. If that happens, the result is an instant and long-lasting surge in traffic through that site.

See where this is going? If you can get popular on a forum related to your subject, create some material that the forum-goers would like, and then link to a social bookmarking site that links to the material you created, you can essentially get a huge pile of free votes from the forum-goers. Make it into the list with those free votes, and all that ‘lost’ time efficiency goes out that window as the traffic surges in.

Pretty neat, huh?

Here’s a classic scenario: a guy gets fired and decides he’s going to be his own boss. He goes online and learns about microsites or affiliate blogging or something, and learns about this thing called SEO. He hears he’s supposed to get backlinks, so he goes out and starts building them. He’s a smart guy and he wants to save himself some work, so he gets a bookmarking daemon and starts submitting 400 bookmarks per day, targeting a different page on his website every day.

At the end of the week, he looks up the phrase he’s submitted as his anchor text, confident he’ll be on the first page — and instead learns that he’s been sandboxed. His backlinks were obviously mechanically created, spam links with negative SEO value. Of course, he didn’t know that — how could he?

Now he’s got to start over with a new URL as well as coming up with a new, more successful SEO strategy. He’s out everything he spent, and he’s still spending just to get back to the starting line.

Contrast that to another guy who got fired and decided to start a website. This guy, however, decided to hand his SEO tasks over to the experts. He hired an SEO company. He paid a hundred bucks more than the other guy (who didn’t pay anything up front!) — but then, all of his startup time and effort wasn’t wasted. He’s taking huge strides down the road to top placements for his keywords, and hasn’t looked back.

Which of those do YOU think is the more ‘affordable’ SEO?

The simple fact is that 49 times out of 50, SEO done by someone that doesn’t do it for a living is going to result in net improvement of nothing. Don’t let that be you — a little money down will save you days of work and heartache in the future.

SEO is vitally important to obtaining one critical thing: traffic. If you rank at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for several good keywords, people will find your website and read it. If you don’t, you have to pay, one way or another, for every visitor that comes to visit your site. Either you’re paying for them individually, like with pay-per-click marketing, or you’re paying for advertisements like a brick-and-mortar business would.

Of course, you can — and probably should — pay for SEO services, too. Trying to do your own SEO on top of everything else you need to do to get your online business off the ground is like pausing in the middle of a marathon in order to do a quick triathlon. The difference between paying for SEO and paying for traffic, however, is enormous.

When you pay for traffic, you pay a (more or less) fixed cost per visitor. Your bids might be higher on some keywords than on others, but you’re still paying some amount for every visitor that comes to see you.

On the other hand, when you pay for SEO, you’re investing in future traffic. Your visitors per dollar will pretty much suck for the first couple of months. But as you invest more time and money into SEO, the returns get better and better until they blow pay-per-click marketing out of the water.

Of course, there’s nothing keeping you from doing both PPC and SEO at the same time — in fact, if you can afford it, it’s the preferred way to go — but if you have to pick one over the other, organic SEO is always going to be better in the long term.