A significant amount of time and energy is spent on this single task. A webmaster will commonly focus on:

• Ranking well in search engines
• Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.
• Pay Per View (Banner) programs.
• Link Exchanges
• Directory Submissions
• etc.

All of these methods are viable means of getting traffic. In fact, if you're lucky or competent enough to rank well for your keywords in search engines, you'll find that you get a very large portion of traffic to your website.

What do you do, however, if you rank poorly or, even worse, don't even show up in first 1000 results on any of search engines? What do you do if you don't have a budget set aside for marketing?

This is where people often turn to traffic exchanges. Quite simply, a traffic exchange is a program where you sign up and agree to surf sites in exchange for some credits. These credits are then used when other members of exchange surf to your site.

Now, I'll be quite honest with you, this traffic is not highly targeted traffic. In fact, if this were your only method of advertising your website, you'd probably fail. BUT it is a great method of getting traffic to your site in addition to other methods listed above.

So, why do people use traffic exchanges? Here are a few of benefits:

• Increase your Alexa rating! Did you know that some search engines factor your Alexa rating into their algorithms? More traffic means higher search engine placement!
• Increase your branding awareness. Any marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that branding is extremely important to stand out amongst billions of websites out there.
• More traffic equals more sales. A percentage of people surfing will be enticed by your ads and click on them to find out more information.
• Another source of revenue. Many traffic exchanges will actually pay you money to surf. More importantly, as you refer other people to network, you'll earn a percentage of money that they earn! It may be small amounts but if you work system it could amount to a lot of money.

What Directories to Submit To The best are Search Engine Friendly directories (those that actually have your site URL listed at some point, rather than outlinks that are simply code). Some will ask for a reciprocal link, some will not. One list of non-reciprocal directories is at http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly.php. Opinion at moment is suggesting that non-reciprocal or one-way links are better, although any relevant link is useful. Directories that encode their links are mostly useful for traffic if their Alexa Ranking is high enough. Directories that do not encode outgoing links will help your website's Search Engine Ranking.

Deep Linking It can be worth linking to other pages on your site other than your main page. Before doing this, make sure that directory you are submitting to permits you to both submit URLs other than your home page (some only allow top level submission), and for same site to be submitted to different categories (not all directories permit what are essentially multiple submissions of same website). This will work especially if you have online tools or directories (such as your links page) on your site that are useful and relevant to add to other directory categories.

Choose Relevant Directory Category Most directories will have many categories you can submit your site to. Decide on one that is most relevant, preferably a keyword that you are aiming for high search engine ranking in, and try to submit to same or similar category in every directory, at least for your main page (also see Deep Linking above). This will increase ranking of your site relating to keyword chosen.

Submit to Different Categories If directory allows multiple submissions, and your website is relevant in several categories, submit to all relevant categories you can. This will increase number of incoming links to your website. Again, carefully check terms of any directory before trying this to make sure it is permitted.