Getting traffic to your website is a very important part of online marketing and sharing information with people but are you getting traffic to your site that is actually interested in your site or are they just using up your bandwidth?

If all you want to do is get traffic to your site then you can easily go and purchase something like 10000 visitors for fifteen dollars but do you really think they will do you any good, because I don't. What you want to do is get targeted traffic that comes to your site because they are interested in the subject of it and really want to see what you have to offer. This is much harder to do.

Here are a few methods of getting good traffic and a few of getting bad traffic.

Good:

1. Link exchanging with other relevant sites. You can put a description of your site beside your link, therefore the visitors you get will already know what they are looking for and will have decided themselves that they would like to visit your site.

2. Search engine optimization for the keywords that your site is about. When someone searches for a term, they are looking specifically for sites around that term therefore if your site is well optimized for good keywords then you should be able to gain some quality visitors from the search engines.

3. Free ebooks and reports are excellent as you can provide quality information about your subject and then link to your site from within the product. Doing this will mean that people will first read your product if they are interested in the subject, enjoy reading youir product and then want to get more information and that is when you can give them a link to your site.

Bad:

1. Buying loads of visitors for a few dollars. It is possible to buy good traffic but only when you are in control of how they find your site. You will find that most companies that offer traffic for a price will normally only send autosurfers and people who are not in the least bit interested in your site to it.

2. Autosurf programs are not a good source of traffic as people will just leave their computer on and let it surf from site to site without anyone actually getting to view and stay at it.

3. Advertising on sites that have absolutely nothing to do with yours. If you have a site about cooking, then you will have very little success by advertising on a site about computer games. That's just an example of the top of my head but I mean that you should not advertise on sites that are not related to yours .

There are many different ways to get traffic and many of them work very effectively, however, I would definitely advise anyone not to simply go out and look for ways to get any sort of traffic but instead look for ways to get good traffic that is actually interested in visiting your site and seeing what you have to offer.