Traffic is the movement of motorized vehicles, unmotorized vehicles and pedestrians on roads. Traffic laws are the laws which govern traffic and regulate vehicles, while rules of the road are both the laws and the informal rules that may have developed over time to facilitate the orderly and timely flow of traffic.

The number of people who have visited a website. Search engine optimization companies keep track of the traffic for the sites they optimize, as a way evaluate the effectiveness of their procedures and show the client how the optimization is improving the amount of people the website is being viewed by. Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth. not all web traffic is welcome.

Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site. Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on search engines and through Search engine optimization.

Web traffic can be increased by placement of a site in search engines and purchase of advertising, including bulk e-mail, pop-up ads, and in-page advertisements. Web traffic can also be increased by purchasing non-internet based advertising. If a web page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly (especially if there is other competition on the first page). Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that go to subsequent pages is substantially lower. Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines is as important as the web site itself. There are a number of other things you can do to increase your web traffic, including but not limited to building link popularity, webrings, offering free e-books or articles and classified advertisements.

Of the above mentioned items, perhaps the easiest one to do is building link popularity. This can be accomplished by writing e-mails to sites similar to yours and asking if they would link to your site. The second way of increasing your web traffic is writing to e-zines or to free article sites. There are many sites which will accept your written material, the catch is that you are giving it away for free. The benefit, however, is that you get to include a link to your site in the article, meaning every time someone clicks on your link, it brings free traffic to your site. Pixel ads can bring traffic to your site but usually will not get you a targeted audience.

Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as "organic" traffic. Organic traffic can be generated or increased by including the web site in directories (such as Yahoo! and DMOZ), search engines (such as Google and Inktomi), guides (such as yellow pages and restaurant guides) and award sites.

In most cases the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Just registering does not guarantee traffic, as search engines work by "crawling" registered web sites. These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page and the page title. In most cases they also index the web page header (Meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance according to the search engine algorithms.

Usually, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from web users. According to some studies. the top result gets between 5% and 10% of the clicks. Each subsequent result gets between 30% and 60% of the clicks of the previous one. This indicates that it is important to appear in the top results. There are some companies which specialize in search engine marketing. However, it is becoming common for webmasters to get approached by "boiler-room" companies with no real knowledge of how to get results. As opposed to pay-per-click, search engine marketing is usually paid monthly or annually, and most search engine companies cannot promise specific results for what is paid to them. Because of the huge amount of information available on the web, crawlers might take days, weeks or months to complete review and index all the pages they find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over eight billion pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of pages, a complete reindexing takes its time. That is why some pages recently updated in certain web sites are not immediately found when doing searches on search engines.

Natural website traffic is also in some cases attributed to the name of the website, particularly when the website uses a primary dictionary term as its domain name. For instance many women instinctively know they can go to "Shoes.com" and peruse shoes online. They do not need to go to a search engine to find that name into their browser. In the past many valuable names were simply undeveloped and you might see "under construction" or "free parking" listed, however today, many high profile domain names are in use, and therefore increase the web surfer's belief they can go directly to a site based on its name. Another example is "Porn.com" which sold for 9.5 million dollars due to the ability to save on search engines and likelihood to attract visitors by name. Not a great example but a clear one. Another example might be "BankRate.com" in which a bank rate might be found immediately. Other examples include cultural oddities such as "BavarianDancers.com". As all domains that represent a topic are likely registered, a visitor can find what they are looking for by typing in the topic.

For that reason the domain name market is considered to be a very big factor in not only obtaining traffic, but especially in creating a name that is easily remembered. eLoans, is easily recalled, as will be the new domain name purchased by CNN "iReport". It is possible that millions of people will log on to report news as that brand becomes a household name, if it happens to.