If you have a website you need traffic, that's obvious. But how do you get it? In the next few paragraphs I will outline a strategy that will help you to achieve tons of the best traffic - targeted search engine traffic - and all for free! Let's first of all look at some ways in which you can approach the subject of obtaining traffic for your website.

1. You can buy visitors. There are hundreds of websites out there who will sell you visitors. You can have 100,000 visitors delivered to your site in 30 days. The trouble with this is that the visitors haven't asked to see your site and will probably leave immediately and it costs money.

2. You can pay to have your site optimised for the search engines. This can help but it can be very expensive.

3. You can use pay-per-click advertising. This can be effective but if you are in a competitive category it can be work out very costly.

The methods above all have two things in common - their effectiveness can be doubtful and they cost money.

What if there was an alternative? A way to obtain a high search engine ranking and have hundreds, if not thousands, of other websites send you traffic by the ton, all for free?

Well, such an alternative exists.

Before I tell you what it is, let me say a few words about link popularity. It is well known that the major search engines will regard your site as being more important and your rankings will therefore increase, if you are seen to have large numbers of incoming links from websites that are themselves regarded as important.

Now, some websites have thousands of pages of keyword-rich content. They have high rankings and are favoured by the search engines. Just the sort of sites that you would want to get free traffic from and have your links on, am I right?

Well, you can!

What's more, these websites will allow you to hitch a ride off their massive traffic, top search engine placements and let you advertise on hundreds of web pages, all for free!

What are these wonderful philanthropic, traffic-generating websites and how can you take advantage the opportunities that they offer?

These websites are Article Directories. There are around 100 of them containing thousands of articles in dozens of different categories. How does this help you?

It's a two step process.

Step 1. Pick a topic and write an article about it. Choose something that is relevant to your own website.

Step 2. Submit your article to all the top online article directories, announcement lists and to other ezine publishers and webmasters.

What happens next?

When your article is published by the Article Directory sites you will have a link from a popular and important site.

As other sites pick up your article and republish it you will have links from them.

Readers of your article will visit your main site as a result of the link in your resource box.

The search engines will discover these links from your article to your website. These inward links should boost your site's rankings, resulting in yet more traffic.

All this from just one article! And why stop there? Write an article a week or a month or whatever you can manage, and you will soon have your links spread all over the internet, bringing in more and more traffic.

Submitting your articles to Article Directories by hand can be done but it is time consuming. Time that would be better spent writing more articles! Not only that but there is a good chance that you would miss out on several good sites for your article. I would suggest and recommend that you automate this part of the process. A good place to start is to visit http://www.articlemarketer.com?a_aid=d03852d2. Here you will be able to submit articles in the knowledge that you are not missing out any important sites and also that you are complying with their submission policies.

I hope you will give this strategy a try. You have nothing to lose but could gain a great deal!

George Cuthbert