Reciprocal links / Link Popularity

Not only will links to your site from others increase your ranking on some search engines, but also they will ensure a constant stream of targetted traffic to your site. You want right visitors for your product or service, not random visitors. It is worth exchanging links with sites with a similar theme to your own. You won't lose traffic, if your exchanged links are bringing same amount (or more) back to your own site. More importantly however, Google measures your site's "link popularity" (the number of sites which link to yours) to determine its page ranking, so effort in this area is essential. The more relevant these links are to content of your own site offering, better. Also ensure your site is well linked together, since internal links also count towards your site's Google Pagerank.

Maintaining your traffic

Traffic building is not a one off process. It is a permanent activity. Search engines may drop your pages when they re-index (which happens periodically), or may not index your pages at all during busy times. Search engine submission should be an ongoing activity, with each page resubmitted on a monthly basis, as a general guideline. If your pages do not rank highly first time, you will need to revisit source code in under performing pages, and resubmit.

These initial steps deal with physical process of initial traffic generation. Following these steps will bring you visitors, then it is up to you to keep them coming back for more. Good site content, structure and positioning are key to building a lasting web community.