The most useful website of the world could be a site that no one but the owner knows about. It is not simply enough to create a website or Internet blog, create content and hope that everything will go well and your website will receive thousands of visitors a day. This is actually work especially at the beginning.

I would like to outline several ways of driving traffic to your website to get you started. Important is that you optimized your website for SEO. That means that you use a unique title for every website that describes the content, that you use a H1 tag with the same title and keywords that you aim for. I usually don’t put much thought into keywords or keyword density though but some webmasters swear on that. I personally think that it takes away the fun of writing articles and I do not like it at all.

There are two types of traffic that you can go for. Search Engine Traffic and Links. Search Engine Traffic should be pretty obvious. The better you rank in Google, Yahoo and Live the more traffic you will get for the keyword, or search phrases. Depending on your niche it can be hard to reach the top in a short time, mostly because of a feature called Sandbox that prevents new sites from entering markets (keywords) that have lots of competition.

So, even if you would have the best backlinks, best onsite SEO you could still be ranking in the hundreds somewhere although you would be in the top 10 if you would not be in the sandbox.

You can increase your rankings by getting backlinks using the anchor tag that you aim for.  I like the distinction that Grizzly posted in his blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners:

1. Can everyone get the same link? - think do-follow - think crappy.
2. Is the link coming from a high PR site but not relevant to your site - better but not great.
3. Is the link coming from a relevant site with low PR - better still even kinda great but not really great.
4. Is the link coming from a relevant High PR site contained in the content of an article relevant to the page on your site that it is linked to - OK this is better than great - this is the perfect backlink.

What he is saying and what I can confirm from tests is that backlinks that come from a relevant website that has a high Pagerank in the same niche are the best, and hardest to get.  I’m still a bit puzzled about the term niche in this context though. Lets say I have a shoe blog. Is a fashion related website niche related  and considered a good link partner ? What about a shopping site, women blogs ? I would say yes but I can’t say for sure.

The second option to get traffic is by getting links. I would - again - divide this section into several subsections. Two of them are social media websites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon while the second are links from other websites.

The advantage of social media websites is that you can post your links by yourself. You can stumble your own links, digg your own links and add your links to delicious in the hope that someone else likes it and adds them to his inventory as well. The best case would be to get a link promoted to the homepage which would mean that this article and your website will get lots of traffic and backlinks.

Getting links from other webmasters is considerably harder if no one knows your blog and you do not have a Pagerank yet. If no one knows you no one can link to you. This means you have to get your blog to be recognized.

I prefer three ways to do that.

1. When you write articles link to blogs in the same niche when appropriate and let them know that you are there. Most webmasters check those links and will add your website to their RSS feed. My advice is to not aim for the high rollers but small and medium sites at the beginning unless you write an incredible article.
2. Let other webmasters know about an article that you have written. Send them an email or contact them telling them that you wrote an article that would be worth mentioning on their website. Several websites have a “TIP US” section where you can send in tips and if they like them they write about the tip and normally mention your name and website.
3. Participate in other blogs as a regular commenter. This is important because you can easily build a relationship with fellow bloggers this way. This is probably the most important aspect, you can receive a wealth of information by exchanging knowledge with fellow bloggers.

Just remember that it takes time to get traffic. But you can speed up the process if you begin to actively build links to your website.