If you are a webmaster, quick, tell me what is it that you seek for your websites? If your answer is anything other than traffic, something is definitely wrong! Naturally, there can be other valid webmaster's goals such as developing your site into an authority site, or generating revenue (can't fault that one). But, the backbone of gainful websites is traffic ? lots of it. Relevant traffic. Traffic that converts. Traffic that is natural.

But, where do you get traffic from? The first school of traffic generation relates to the fundamental dictum of "build a good mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door." Of course there is bound to be significant doubt about what is the mark of a "good mouse trap." But the idea has its merits. If you already have a good website, and can promote it, you will be able to generate traffic.

Sadly, instead of using the principal of "build a good mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door," some website owners rely on "build and they will come." This is the passive approach to website traffic generation. Sure, it is not as though you will not get any traffic, but you are leaving a lot of money on the table. And that is not a good thing. Instead of having your finger in too many pies, you must give attention to only as many sites as you can actively promote. Sounds like a bunch of common sense, right? Actually, it is not so common to see this basic principle being followed.

Then there are those who will buy traffic. Ask a webmaster and usually they will find the idea of buying traffic disgraceful. The reason for this is that the sites that sell traffic do it by using paid surfers, auto-surfing programs, pop-ups, pop-downs, etc. This leads to a drop in the quality of the traffic so that it becomes nearly no good.

Of course, a great solution for traffic is search engines. In case you can get search engines to rank you decently, you can expect to get lots of traffic from search engines. But give attention to only the few big ones ? Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask probably constitute well in the excess of 90% of all search engine queries. Having a marvelous site with great content, great navigation and many links from reputed sites is the ideal method of getting a good search engine rank.