That is important to get traffic for your web site but how do you want to get it? In this article I will outline a strategy that will help you to receive tons of unique - targeted and friendly search engine traffic - and all these for no money!

First we should look at some ways in which you can approach the subject of obtaining traffic for your website.

1.     Many webmasters buy visitors. There are hundreds of firms and websites out there who will sell you unique visitors and they promise you will get those traffics in a short time. You can have 100,000 visitors delivered to your site in 10 or 20 days. The problem with this is that the visitors haven't decided to go on your web site and will probably leave immediately and it costs money per visitor.

2.     You can pay some companies out there to get your site optimized for the search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. This is helpful but it will be very expensive for you when your firm is at the beginning.

3.     You can use pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords, Kontera (a contextually relevant keyword). This can be effective and helpful but if you are in a competitive category with your keywords it can be very expensive.

All these methods above have two things in common - their effectiveness cannot be %100 and they cost money.

Is there any other alternative? A way to increase a high search engine ranking by Google, Yahoo, or MSN and have hundreds, if maybe thousands of other web pages send you traffic by the ton, all for free?

Well, such a good and free alternative exists.

You should know some important information about link popularity before I tell you how this alternative works. It is well known that the major search engines will regard your site as being more important and your rankings will therefore increase, if you are seen to have large numbers of incoming links from websites that are themselves regarded as important.

Now, some websites have thousands of pages of keyword-rich content. They have high rankings and are favored by the search engines. Just the sort of sites that you would want to get free traffic from and have your links on, am I right? Well, you can!

What's more, these websites will allow you to hitch a ride off their massive traffic, top search engine placements and let you advertise on hundreds of web pages, all for free!

What are these wonderful philanthropic, traffic-generating websites and how can you take advantage the opportunities that they offer?

These websites are Article Directories. There are around 100 of them containing thousands of articles in dozens of different categories. How does this help you?

It's a two step process.

Step 1:  Pick a topic and write an article about it. Choose something that is relevant to your own website.
Step 2:  Submit your article to all the top online article directories, announcement lists and to other ezine publishers and webmasters.

What happens next?

You will get links to your site by the article being posted by the Article Directory sites. You will get more links as other sites pick up your articles and reprint them. You will get direct traffic from the Article Directory sites. You will get indirect traffic from sites that pick up and reprint your article.
The search engines will find links from your article to your website. These are contextual links and are given more importance than links from unrelated pages.

The inward links should boost your site's rankings, resulting in yet more traffic.

All this from just one article! And why stop there? Write an article a week or a month or whatever you can manage, and you will soon have your links spread all over the internet, bringing in more and more traffic.

Submitting your articles to Article Directories can be done but it is time consuming. Time that would be better spent writing more articles! Not only is that but there a good chance that you would miss out on several good sites for your article. I would suggest and recommend that you automate this part of the process. A good place to start is to visit http://www.articleinspector.com. Here you will be able to submit articles in the knowledge that you are not missing out any important sites and also that you are complying with their submission policies.

I hope you will give this strategy a try. You have nothing to lose but could gain a great deal!