Traffic is especially tricky, because there is so much competition in almost every imaginable niche.  With so much competition, everyone who is competing ends up getting less traffic.  Most of the traffic goes to the few authority sites that dominate the search engines, and the rest have to fight for what’s left, like a pack of wild dogs fighting over a carcass that’s been picked over by a mountain lion.

Search engine traffic is, by far, the easiest and best way to get traffic.  That is, if you know how.  The good news is, other traffic methods actually help your search engine rankings significantly by giving you backlinks that help boost your authority.  So using these other traffic generation methods will actually help your search engines rankings, too!

Let’s look at a few traffic generation methods that can not only bring you direct traffic, but will also help your search engine rankings.

Article Marketing

Perhaps the easiest way to get traffic and improve your search engine rankings at the same time is through writing and submitting articles to article directories.  Article directories often have great search engine authority that they can pass along to your sites, plus, your articles there will often rank well and get you plenty of traffic, too.

Try these directories:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articlesbase.com

http://www.buzzle.com

http://www.articlecity.com

You should know that some article directories use the “rel=nofollow” tag on their links, so check that before you submit.  You could still get some direct traffic from them, but they won’t help you with your search engine rankings.

Social Content

Social content sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com are great for getting traffic.  The pages you make there can often rank high in search engines and get you direct traffic, and the links you put to your site on those pages can also bring you some very nice backlinks.  Just remember to make quality pages.  If your pages aren’t high quality, your account could be banned, your pages deleted, or you could have your links tagged with “rel=nofollow”.

Blog Commenting

Yes, commenting on blogs like this one can bring you traffic.  Not only will you get direct traffic, but you could end up getting a lot of link juice for the search engines!  Just be aware that most blogs have the nofollow tag on their links by default.  So check out some of the dofollow blog directories to find blogs you can comment on!  (HINT: This blog has dofollow links, so comment away!)

Here are a couple of dofollow blog directories to get you started:

http://www.dofollowblogs.com/

http://followlist.com/

I’ll get more in depth into traffic generation later.  I just wanted to give you a very quick overview of a few tactics you can use.