If you’re looking at the website of a SEO company, it’s probably not the only way you’ve considered building traffic. No doubt, you’ve been bombarded with spam from people eager to show you how to get “50,000 hits on your site every month for $100″ or similar promotions.

While it might, at first, sound appealing to be able to say, “I’m getting 50,000 visitors per month to my site”, it’s the quality of visitors that matter far more than the number.

When people are willing to promise you specific quantities of traffic, your first question should be “how can they do that?” Although we may know, for example, that 500,000 searches per month are made for a given keyword, real customers do not come in neat boxes of 1,000 users that can be blindly pointed to your site. When you see guaranteed traffic packages, it usually comes from one of a few sources:

• Malware. A classic symptom of undesirable software installed on your PC is when the browser starts popping up windows you didn’t ask for. Those windows don’t choose their destinations for fun. If you have an army of compromised computers opening whatever pages you order them to, it’s easy to ensure that your site gets 50,000 hits this month.

• Automaton Users. A similar story to malware, but with user cooperation. I’ve seen programs where they’ll basically pay users to leave their PCs on a special homepage, which uses browser-scripting to shuffle from one paying customer’s site to another. No matter how compelling your content is, it’s unlikely a user will be willing to turn off the automatic cycling”and his 10 cents per hour credit”to read it, assuming the sponsored browser window doesn’t turn into background noise altogether.

• Sham sites. It looks like a search engine, or legitimate directory, but the results have been partially, or completely stacked, to ensure that users end up at the sites that paid for their position. There’s nothing wrong with paid directories in and of themselves”Yahoo! is a shining example of how one can be a legitimate and trustworthy resource, and many of them represent strong B2B presences”but there’s a thin line which seperates “legitimate resource” from hall-of-mirrors scam. And “Hall of Mirrors” here is more than a cute metaphor: I’ve seen sites where “Page 2″ of the results are almost complete duplicates of “Page 1″! They’re serious about moving people to those links.
• Domain parking and forwarding. This is, in a sense, a cut over the sham site, in that it doesn’t promise to be anything but a dead site. There’s a little more integrity there. However, the user who typed in the dead site’s address probably wasn’t looking for you.

What do all these traffic sources have in common? Two things:

First, they’re going to be fountains of poor-quality traffic. If the user didn’t even want to go to your page, the odds are extremely high he’ll bounce. Meanwhile, “sham” search engines and directories have a motivation to ensure every user clicks something, even if it’s not a really useful site for his needs. The sham-search may consider your site relevant enough to promote, but the customer probably won’t.

Second, they have terrible reputations. Nobody wants to be associated with spyware or attempts to decieve users. Users may do more than bounce- they’ll remember who was associated with their frustration.

Still, many people will respond to the siren-song of guaranteed traffic, believing “even if a handful of those 50,000 visitors explore my site, I’ve gotten business I didn’t have.” Wrong. You’d be astonished how low click-through rates can be with low-quality traffic. I can quote statistics from a site using one of these programmes: over 80,000 visits to their front page in one month, and less than 50 visits to all the other public pages combined. The click-through rate, overall, was approximately one-twentieth of a percent. Notice I’m not saying “conversion rate”, or “sales rate”, just “rate of visiting a page other than the site’s front page!”

Basically, it’s a rehash of the old “pay-per-impression” advertising model, except instead of paying for uninterested customers to ignore your banner, you’re paying for uninterested customers to ignore your entire home page, plus the additional hosting expenses associated with the extra “junk” traffic.

Moreover, it diverts your web budget from places it will do good. $100 might buy you 50,000 low-quality clicks from a guaranteed-traffic service, or 1,000 hits on a smartly-targeted pay-per-click advertisement campaign which lets you choose, to a much greater extent, who you’re paying to bring to the site. Once you consider the conversion rate of advertising clients, versus the guaranteed-traffic client, the advertisements become an undeniable bargain.

You might be tempted to say “Isn’t SEO very much the same as a sham site or parked domain” fooling customers into clicking on your site?”. The answer is a resounding no. Ethical” and productive” search optimization is about attracting customers for the services you’re actually offering. The visitors SEO produces are customers who already were interested in what you’re selling. Optimization ensures that they know you’re offering it. That’s a far cry from the world of bought traffic, which would merrily hand out the same site to viewers actually seeking information about European vacations, reptile care, and new video cards.

After all this invective, I must admit that there is a potential narrow niche for bought traffic: if your site actually benefits from impressions above all else- such as a site swimming in pay-per-impression advertising- then, by all means, shovel those low-quality clicks on. Just don’t be unsurprised as advertisers grow increasingly sophisticated and wonder why 500,000 views of their banner produce zero clicks.