Traffic! I need More Traffic - But How?
Since we have published our websites, or blogs - now what we can expect at the initial phase but for traffic! The major source of traffic is still the generic search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK.com to a little extent. So you need to optimize your pages for getting search engine traffic. You can use these fantastic list of tools to do it even better!
Search Engine Optimization: Top20 SEO Tools
However, search engines often return more than what you actually need and you may need to invest more time to get even a small piece of information. I can recollect that I had to search for hours to get a simple Joomla hack. There were more results than I would need but most of them were useless.
That is why importance of social bookmarking sites are on the rise. I personally like human edited niche web directories to meet up my quest for information in a specific subject. For extensive search I have to revert to traditional searches though.
As a matter of fact there is a drift in search patterns with more people tending to use sites like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, PRweb, StumbleUpon, Technorati, YouTube, del.icio.us or Digg.com to get relevant information. So, you must not exclude these options while framing traffic strategies. Also despite recent Google PR Update, niche web directories will continue to give you some traffic.
And finally, do everything possible to ensure return visits. I have heard of it a lot but really see the difference in CTR when I get to manage return visitors in some of my websites, blogs.
Enjoy!