There are many different ways to create traffic to your website but before we begin suggesting all the wonderful ways, sites and techniques lets first touch on Why.

Why do we want to increase traffic to our websites?

The main reason should be apparent, more clients or sales. Whether we sell services or products getting a new sale or client from your website is always wonderful. If we can sell a service or product without using any resources other than our website that saves us time having to get clients from cold calls, meetings, presentations or trade shows.

Another reason we want more traffic is so we can analyze if our website is working. If we get 100,000 visitors a day but never make sales, then we might want to figure out why.

Another reason is that it helps motivate us. If you spent a lot of time and money building your website and no one ever goes there we might get down a bit, but if people go there it always makes us feel better and motivates us to keep it current and spend more time on it.

OK, now lets talk about what kind of web site traffic we want. Many say that the only traffic we want is targetted traffic after all who wants people looking to buy fish on a website that sells paper. Well, if you are just starting out and you are not getting much traffic you might consider ANY traffic for a while. Fair enough, but that 'any' traffic also has it's benefits as well. Lets assume we get people looking for fish showing up on your paper selling website. This traffic is still of benefit. It increases your Alexa (http://alexa.com) traffic rankings and helps later when you are trying to build links to your site looking for link partners. Link partner requests are more successful if your site has traffic. As well, the fish buyers see your site and might refer others to it.

With that said I do not recommend that you go to fish selling sites and start posting comments and articles unless you like buying fish and post relevant content.

OK so how do we increase traffic to our site.

The best method is from search engines. If you appear in the top three listings of a google high search keyword you will get more traffic than you can imagine. The con on this is your page needs to be search engine optimzed. This is not difficult but it does require a bit of knowledge. I am not going to go into detail on this today but I will later.

Another great method is to go to relevant forums or blogs that are in your industry. Ask questions, answer questions, request advice on your site, ask others what they do, write articles, etc... you get the point.

Traffic exchanges is another method to use. These are usually free and have banner and text ad facilities that you can benefit from. You can just search Google for traffic exchanges, go sign up and see how they work for you. They all have stats and you can see how many people go to your sites daily. One that I use that I have had success with is this one, http://peuan.com/tr/tsaff.php, It is one of the most popular sites out there and I get over 100 unique vistors to the sites I list on this site EVERYDAY. This is not the best traffic as most of the people that visit your site are just doing it because they get credit to visit and this allows their own site to have more credits to use so thier sites get seen more. Once again this helps with your ranking, it's usually free, but it takes a bit of work.. You need to have credits to get your site seen, you get credits by looking at others. Make the most of it by viewing sites that are in your industry and see what your competitors are doing and get great ideas.

Yet another site I use for traffic AND backlinks is http://linkreferral.com This site allows you to create an account for free and post your site. Others look at your site and write reviews on your site. You only get from 20 to 40 visitors a day, but you get around 5 reviews of your site a day written. This is great for back links or links to your site. As well some of the advice, not all, is great. The only con in regard to this site is you have to view 30 sites a day, write 5 reviews a day (15 mins) choose one favorite site a day and write one forum post a day. The forum post can be a comment agreeing, answering, added experience info or asking a question. The total time per day is around 25 - 40 mins everyday. This will keep your site at the top of the list and ensure you get 20 to 40 visitors and 5 or so reviews about your site everyday.

I hope you found some of this useful. I am very interested in other techniques or any way people drive traffic to their sites. Please share with us your tips.

Thanks for reading this and if you would like to read more articles that I have written you can visit my blog at http://peuan.com/seoblog/.