Social Marketing vs Search Engine Marketing

So you have a website but do you get enough traffic? The number of page views your website gets determines its success. What's a website worth anyway if only gets a few page views.There are several ways of increasing the traffic to your website. We'll discuss only social marketing, which is getting popular, and search engine marketing.Social MarketingA lot of people are joining social communities and social bookmarkings these days. These sites allow you to interact with other people who are interested in different topics and many of them operates a blog.Social CommunitiesThese sites allow you to insert your profile for other members to see. Most of these sites allow you to insert your blog or website. You get traffic from these sites by participating in discussions and interacting with members. It's mostly about getting friendly and getting noticed.If you get popular with these sites, you may get a lot of traffic and some search engine popularity through blogroll exchanges and link loves.Social BookmarkingThese sites allow you to bookmark your favorite web pages, not just your own. However, bookmarking only your webpages can decrease your rank so you need to bookmark other web pages too.You get traffic when others sees your bookmark and clicks on the link. Since your link are there, it may also gain some search engine popularity.The Cons for Social SitesHuge traffic comes if you actively participate in these sites. That would become too tedious in the long run. If your participation wanes, so is your traffic. One other thing, members of these sites also have a website to promote, so their interest to your website would not be so much.Search Engine MarketingTraffic which comes from search engines are people who are looking for information in the internet. When they find your site from the search results and click on the link, they are most probably interested on the subject. In all likelihood, they may be interested to what you are promoting.To get your pages included in the search engine's results page,  your pages need to be popular for them. Popularity means having many websites are linking to your site.Several ways are available for you to get links. Submitting your site to link directories, buying links(not recommended), engaging in link exchanges with other websites etc.Getting links from other sites is not enough, you need to get your links to sites which are related to your website. To the search engines, the link with a related subject must be important as it pertains to the content of the website.The anchor text is also very important when other sites link to you. So when you are submitting to link directories or whatever, you need to place your keyword as the anchor text.One very good way of acquiring links is to submit articles to article directories. You get to insert your website's url with an anchor text of your choice. Many webmasters search article directories to find content for their website so your article can be published to other websites together with your link.Submit articles often and in no time, you'll get enough traffic from search engines. For sure traffic from search engines are people who are interested in what they are searching for which could be profitable for you.What's Your Choice?Whether you choose social marketing or search engine marketing, you have a chance of to increase your website traffic if you involve yourself diligently and put your heart to it.