[xdude]

It also depends on what type of website it is. Most of the USA people use Google and some Asian countries. Otherwise in Russia, China they have their own search engines and they do not even use Google.

I'm talking about North American, Europe and Asian traffic. Russian and Chinese traffic rarely convert so we don't both much about it. 54% of Russian Search Engine market is covered by company called Yandex. It's the 3rd most popular site there and Google is at #8. Baidu is top Chinese search engine. It's similar to Google but runs lots of invisible filters. When it comes to SEO Russian or Chinese traffic matters only if there is a local interest.

[Lampard]

I'm talking about North American, Europe and Asian traffic. Russian and Chinese traffic rarely convert so we don't both much about it. 54% of Russian Search Engine market is covered by company called Yandex. It's the 3rd most popular site there and Google is at #8. Baidu is top Chinese search engine. It's similar to Google but runs lots of invisible filters. When it comes to SEO Russian or Chinese traffic matters only if there is a local interest.

It actually depends on what type of website it is. Blogs would prefer to have it from all places, (International one).
And e-commerce locally would just do for their own interest, and will look what is mostly used in their country.

[xdude]

Even for Blogs it all about how do you monetize it. Of Course it's hobby blog. For example If a blog is using Amazon.com Affiliate program (different from Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk) owner would only wants and focus on USA traffic. Because you wont get paid for traffic from other countries unless you set up ads fro those Amazon sites too.

But if you are using Adsense then traffic from all countries is game, technically. But not practically. For example if your site is about New York Real estate but your traffic is mostly from China then it's not good. There is a good chance sooner or later AdSense take ads off from that site telling traffic is harming their advertiser interests. You can find people complain offen in webmaster forums that AdSense kicked them out without a reason or doing nothing.

Even for an e-commerce site these rules apply. Depending on they only sell locally or within group of countries or ship to anywhere.

[tryp4vps]

But if you are using Adsense then traffic from all countries is game, technically. But not practically......

Traffics from different countries are different and cannot be the same. It mostly depends on how much the advertisers are willing to pay in a particular country. That is why most webmasters would like to target their websites to U.S. audiences, because U.S. advertisers usually pay more. So, if most of your traffics come from India (just as a example), your AdSense earnings will be much lower because Indian advertisers usually pay much less.

[xdude]

That's why I said Technically, but not practically. In theory Google pay for every click no matter where it come from. But in reality Google remove clicks from unworthy locations. Just like they remove clicks from same ip addresses etc.

[deanhills]

Although I can see how SEO like this can make a difference to traffic, I can't help wonder whether it can only be temporary when the rest of the Website doesn't catch the attention of the SEO audience for the longer term. Like I've noticed at one of the Forums where I'm posting that a really great SEO specialist who owns the Forum has the ability to get enormous traffic through his SEO efforts. We then get LOADS of spam posts from an audience we're not really interested in giving hosting to, and of those we have almost zero members who are really interested for the longer term. We haven't really gained anything from this effort, as he does this sporadically, and by the time he does it again there is almost zero traffic.

I'm almost certain if one focuses all of one's attention on making the Website as attractive as possible and focus only on long term interest - and therefore audiences that are naturally suited to the Website that the results will grow by itself. SEO can become artificial at a point and be very counter-productive. Instead of opting for huge numbers of traffic, rather network quality links with people who are genuinely interested in the product.

[Kururin]

Yahoo and Bing has the same SEO optimization strategy, you just sign up for their webmaster tools, submit the site and you better be sure you actually have good SEO since their bot isn't really like google who can crawl mostly everything. Then just wait

[xdude]

SEO is an artificial process. Nothing natural about it. We try to outsmart Google Algorithm and out rank other websites. If your main focus is not money then yeah then can fully focus on site rather than SEO. But if you earn money from your websites or it's your full time revenue source then it's different. You can wait next 10 years hoping the site will take better placements in search result or you can work on SEO.

SEO and Traffic are 2 different things. If you are focus on traffic then you need to have even more in-depth plan. Also the niche matters too. About the forum you are talking about it's another free vps / hosting provider. So those who comes there are register are those who want the service for FREE. Unfortunately most of them have no interest in making quality posts. They just want to get a free server by doing whatever the easy thing. Its pretty much same in all free vps provider forums.

But what if you optimize your site for keywords like Paid Hosting etc. Then those who looks for this in search are those who willing to pay for the service. Then it's a different crowd. SEO is not something we can generalize. If you need good result then you need to micro manage everything. Like people like me who are affiliates don't just optimize whole sites. We are focus on each webpage based on a primary keyword and then set of secondary keywords. We break the process in to small parts.

01. We need to get our sites to top ranking in search
02. Site need to be noticed by searchers and click.
03. Content need to be optimize so visitors find its interesting.
04. Then offer the products with instructions and advice.

We can just keep optimizing 03 04 parts and then we are not going to get much traffic. Competitors will take most of it. But after several years when the site has massive amount of content and create an authority over niche then you don't need to do much SEO. But it doesn't mean we stop doing it.

Think about a train. Now it need to be travel on lets say 200 miles per hour. So now train has reached this speed. What happen if we stop engines ? It won't stop right away but it will slow down and come to halt sooner or later. Then we would have to start and reach that speed again. So it's easier just maintaining that speed. It's something taken not just for SEO but also for marketing. This example used to be a standard in marketing lectures years ago.