Internet marketing is all about selling products and services in an online business environment. The website acts as a public face of the business in an online business environment. The customers/consumers communicate with a business organization for a variety of reasons solely through its website. The customers may be looking for some general information, seeking some specific product information, placing an order, tracking an order, looking for support or lodging a complaint.

A website acts as a critical interface between the company and the customers and its importance cannot be overemphasized in the context of an online business. The popularity of any online business depends heavily on the popularity of its website. The online marketing activity is primarily focused on attracting online visitors to the company website. This activity is referred to as traffic generation in the online business domain. A high traffic generating website is considered healthy for the business since it signifies increased business activity which ultimately leads to enhanced profitability. Hence, traffic generation may be referred to as the holy grail of the Internet marketing process.

Traffic generation is the primary goal of all the activities related to the online marketing process. Online businesses spend tens of thousands of dollars in ensuring that their websites are able to generate sufficient traffic in terms of the online visitors to their websites. This task is easier said than done. There is no point in online businesses hiring expensive web designers to create highly interactive websites only to find that there are not enough people interested to pay a visit to that website. This is exactly what happens with the websites that do not lay due emphasis on the traffic generation activities undertaken in the online marketing process.

Traffic generation is as important to an online business as the arrival of customers is to an offline business. Customers bring business in an offline environment and the traffic generation activities bring customers in the online business environment respectively. No traffic, translates into nil business, and it can spell doom for a company. Some of the most successful websites have very simple designs but are very active in their promotional activities aimed at traffic generation.

With more and more businesses progressing into the online environment, website promotion has become an ever-expanding industry that employs various methods for website traffic generation. The various techniques used for the traffic generation purposes are also evolving at a fast pace. An effective traffic generation plan involves a number of related components and a careful blending of all of them, leading to a desired increase in the website traffic.

Of late, website traffic generation has evolved into a separate discipline within the online marketing domain. This discipline outlines undertaking the primary activity of website traffic generation in the most comprehensive manner while keeping all the relevant points under consideration to achieve the desired results in an effective and efficient manner translating into high traffic volumes for a particular website being promoted in the online business environment.