I'd love to see a cite for "80% of web traffic comes from search engines". I've worked on plenty of high-traffic public websites in my day, and have never, ever found that to be the case. If anything, more traffic comes from portals such as Yahoo, AOL, and MSN than anywhere else, and by that I mean direct links from the main page, which cost money.

People don't get to nike.com by typing "shoes" in a search engine. "Shoes" on Google gets "Vegetarian Shoes" as the first link. Yeah, that's relevant.

In my experience, search engine placement as a priority is the technique used by sites that don't have any money and want traffic for free. Keep in mind that traffic != sales, and traffic != revenue. They're not even directly proportional.

How you drive traffic depends on the target audience. Sometimes its a search engine, I would say search engines are the last place people look when they want to spend money. Search engines are used, in my opinion, by people looking for information or anything else that's free, not for someplace to spend money.

"CDs" at Google doesn't get me Amazon, yet that's the first place I go when I want to buy a CD from a major artist. Even a specific artist like "Eminem CD" doesn't get me Amazon anywhere near the top of the results.

For us, our Tomcat-based commercial applications are sold face-to-face by salespeople.

John