It's easy to create a website these days. Getting people to actually visit it is the hard part: It requires a lot of time and effort, and while money isn't necessary, it certainly helps. A lot of get-traffic-quick schemes exist, but most of them are either outright scams or search engine exploits that usually end up hurting you in the long run. Tried-and-true methods for building traffic also exist, and with the right combination of perseverance and common sense, you'll start seeing traffic for your site.
Look Professional
If you haven't set up your website yet, make sure to come up with a professional domain name and a site design that fits your site's themes and isn't too messy. Spend the $10 it costs to get your own domain name--greatwebsite.com looks a lot better than greatwebsite.blogspot.com--and make sure the name isn't too long or misspelled. For the design, go easy on the bells and whistles and make sure it's readable and has a clear navigation system.
Build Links
The No. 1 key to boosting your search engine ranking, and thus your traffic, is to get other websites to link to yours. This is called link building, and there are literally hundreds of ways to do it. The old-fashioned way is to email sites that are similar to yours and beg them to do a link exchange: you post a link to their site if they'll post a link to yours. You can also post links to your site within comments in related forums or blogs but make an effort to add to the conversation: people can spot spammers a mile away.
While it may sound counterproductive, a good way to build links over time is to link to other sites a lot: They'll eventually take notice, and if your site is good enough, they'll find an opportunity to link back. Finally, you can also guest-write for another site. Just send them an email with an article proposal. Most sites are happy to have the free content, and you'll get a targeted link back to your own site.
Practice Good SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's a catchall term for anything that improves your site's search engine rankings, but usually it refers to a handful of practices that you can use on your own website that make it more search engine friendly.
Search engines reward certain coding practices, the most common of which are: making sure all your images have "alt" attributes; making sure all your titles are enclosed in either "h1" or "h2" tags; making sure you have meta information on your pages containing page descriptions and keywords; and making sure your title tag and URL also have keywords in them.
If you're using a website management system such as WordPress or Joomla, most of these practices are already built-in. Your job boils down to two things: writing descriptive titles (i.e., if it's an article about Tom Cruise, make sure "Tom Cruise" is in the title, preferably near the front) and writing descriptive anchor text for your links. What does that mean? Well, instead of writing "click HERE for a Tom Cruise interview," you should write, "check out this TOM CRUISE INTERVIEW."
Use the Social Sites
Social bookmarking site such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, along with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, can be useful for building traffic. However, don't mistake these tools to be the end-all, be-all that a lot of people assumed they were when they were new: They're better for getting your brand out there than for any direct traffic increases. The best way to use them is to advertise specific articles or features on your site, not the site as a whole. Twitter in particular excels at virally spreading links if the content you have is eye-catching enough.
Advertise
You've probably heard more than your fair share of stories about websites that hit pay dirt without any professional marketing at all. But it's undeniable that the right kind of advertising boosts your traffic. Google's Adwords program is a good example: you only pay for the advertising when someone clicks through to your website, meaning the traffic is guaranteed. Still, advertising is expensive, and some forms of it--pop-up advertising in particular--can do more harm than good.
Importance of Content
The most important thing your site needs to build and maintain traffic is quality, consistent content. True, you can't just create a lot of good content and expect people to show up; you have to hustle and build links and get your name out there. But without much content, or with unprofessional content that has a lot of spelling errors, you're not going to get any loyal followers. And while it's great if you have one article that's making the rounds on the social sites, nobody reading it is going to stick around if that's the only good article you have on your site, or if you only update your site once a month. Besides, search engines take notice when you add content consistently; they check your site more often and give you better rankings.
