If you are a webmaster, what is it that you would like your websites to have? If your answer is anything other than traffic, something is definitely wrong! Naturally, there can be other valid webmaster's purposes such as developing your site into an authority site, or generating revenue (can't fault that one). But, the backbone of profitable websites is traffic – lots of it. Relevant traffic. Traffic that converts. Traffic that is natural.

But is there an effective way to find relevant traffic? 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 constitutes a "good mouse trap." But the idea has its merits. By promoting a good website, 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 possible that you will get a decent amount of traffic, but you are leaving a lot of money on the table. And that is not a good thing. Rather than trying to take care of dozens of websites, you must zero in on 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 offensive. One cause for this is that websites that sell traffic do it by using paid surfers, auto-surfing programs, pop-ups, pop-downs, etc. This simply devalues the quality of the traffic till it becomes nearly counterproductive.

Of course, a marvelous solution for traffic is search engines. In case you can get search engines to rank you decently, you can expect to get abundant traffic from search engines. But zero in on only the few big ones – Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask probably constitute well in the excess of 90% of all search engine queries. Having a brilliant site, equally brilliant content, great navigation and many links from reputed sites is the best way of ranking well in search engines.