So you build a site and no one is comming to it? You put your site tracker on the footer of you pages and see no hits.. well the saying "build and they will come" is not true.

First you must realize why did you build the site and what is about.
That is the first step to traffic.. In the search engines. There is something called "keywords" thies are phrases people type into the search engine to find what there looking for...okay you think "getting my site to 1st page for this word is like for Pro's! I can't do that!"

Wrong.


This is what you need to do for traffic. Now you getting your site on 1st pages of Google is work.. as I said in the beginning on this post. Why did you make your site? my motivation is money. I do this for money.. you may do it for a hobby that fine also. But still You need to get your site to first page on google or yahoo for your keywords. Or site will just be another deadweight ghost-town. What is a keyword? Say your site is about "funny pictures".
Then you will want to build links with this keyword in your anchor text

example
<a href="yousite.com">Funny pictures</a>

When a Google bot comes to the page you dropped your link on it count that as a Vote for your site for this keyword.. Now if you get lots and lots of links from other site to your site with your keyword your targeting then your site will rise in the SERP's. (Search engine rank position) Eventually after perhaps a month or month or even a year or more. Depending how competitive that niche is your site will rise in ranks and get on the 1st page of Google or Yahoo for that keyword.. Now you will be getting traffic. Its a slow process.
Remember if your site cannot be found by people in the search engine you will get no traffic. You need spend hours and hours everyday putting down several backlinks. join forums put links in your sig..Post comments on blogs leave your links. Buy links!, Put your site on social bookmakring sites like digg, stumble.. and you will eventually reap the benefits if you can beat out your competition





A few tips.
1. Dont' use the same anchor text over and over. Google will think its spam if your site has the same links over and over.. and also Deep link to your internal pages.

Use Your keyword in your <title> tags on your pages.

3. Use your keyword in your site urls. For example funnypictures.. Buy a domain like
www.crazyfunnypictures.com
The 2 keywords are right in your URL.. +bonus SEO



There is still alot more to this if anyone wants to add to this.


edited for spelling (probably still alot of spelling errors lol)

For some sites, it is hard to find similar sites with good PR that will let you trade links, because it would be competition, so sometimes you have to put it on a slightly different type of site.

Nice article And Great tips

Nice tips.    Another tip that I have heard is to strip the site name from all pages except the index page.

nice tip, thanks for sharing.

Thank you for all the insight. I never know the first thing to do when it comes to things like this so it's nice to have someone with experience give some pointers.