I hope this article can ignite some other creative ways in your mind to increase targeted traffic for your website. I am talking about organic traffic here. The mindset: People come to your website not because they are redirected to your website but because your website has the info that they are looking for at that point of time. Targeted traffic.

Three types of targeted traffic in my mind:
a) practical traffic (by continuously putting useful original content and avoid website mistake, then let the word of mouth takes over from there). This kind of traffic is long-term.
b) marketing traffic. Do seeding and let it grow.
c) technical traffic (by using technical trick).

Focus on practical traffic first before marketing traffic and technical traffic. Visits are the not the same with visitors. It is meaningless if by technical way you get thousands of visitors but they just come for one time and will not come anymore due to the poor and stagnant content of your website.

Search engines will still list your website after their robots and spiders crawl to your website long enough even without you doing anything. And the marketing starts from there by itself. It is just a matter of time. It does not matter if the number of visits is small as long as it is solid.

Temporarily when you do not have anything useful to add to your website, you can let your mind take a break and build up marketing traffic and technical traffic.

Example of marketing traffic (this will not work if the content of your website is poor):
a) Create flyers to put in the mailboxes in the neighborhood or to bring along when you go out. Although the traffic generated by this is not significant but it will grow.
b) Send email and forward funny stuff and include your URL. When your friends forward the funny stuff your send them, your URL will spread out. Also you may use your website email as your routine email. Some people may look out the website when they see your special email address. If any page of your website has universally useful content, you can even send the page link to everybody.

Telling your friends that you have created a website is optional. If you want to do it, I suggest contacting friends whom you have not been keeping in touch with for a long time merely to break the ice again. Meanwhile never suddenly write to people who do not know you yet about your website. That is called spamming.

Technical traffic (these will NOT work if the content of your website is poor):
a) Submit URL and sitemap to search engine. Do it yourself. Do not sign up with any submitter even it is free. And try search your URL in that search engine first before submitting to see if it has listed your website by itself.
b) Retain your visitors. Many websites become successful due to returning visitors. A website will not survive by just relying on new visitors.
c) Make your web pages load faster. You and the people around you may be enjoying fast Internet but there are still a lot of people who are using dialup connection, especially in those countries that the communication market is monopolized.
d) Make your website search engine friendly.

To retain your visitors:
a) Add new page with quality content to your website at least weekly.
b) Create a form for visitors to sign up for an update reminder (at most bi-weekly as visitors do not like a lot of reminder from you) of your website. Doing this will also encourage yourself when you see people signing up.
c) Custom a 404 error 'page not found' page. You do not want to lose any visitor if somehow the page that the visitor wants to go cannot be found due to for example the mistake on the address that the visitor uses.
d) Create RSS feed if your website has new page added weekly or daily. RSS feed is not necessary if new page is added only once in a while.
e) Create a forum for existing visitor to interact with each other.

To make your pages load faster:
1) Do not use fancy feature like special way of page transition. You see no professional website uses that kind of thing. Remember that people go to Internet to find information, not to see your fancy feature.
2) Eliminate 'whitespace' in your html codes. The mindset: to have no extra space, no indent (or tab) at all and as less lines (or returns) in html codes as possible without compromising readability. You should eliminate the whitespace manually without using any software because you know how is considered readable for yourself. But never touch the JavaScript because it may treat 'return' differently.
3) Erase redundant codes or simplify codes wherever possible. Codes are considered redundant when the page still looks like what you want even without the codes.
4) Never put a table inside another table (nested table) and try not to make the whole page one big table.
5) Use cascading style sheet (CSS) if you do not always change the format of your pages.
6) Never load any picture (including background) if the picture is not informational but merely decorational. People do not need the beautification but the substantial info.

To make your website search engine friendly (robots or spiders crawl your website more frequently):
1) Continually add new relevant content to your website. Your own forum can help in this.
2) The relevantly longer the writing the better. You do not have to break your long writing down to a few pages. Watch the word 'relevant' I write here. I mean you had better just let your writing be short if you want to lengthen your writing with long-winding empty talk.
3) No dead links in your website. Actually this is common sense. I do not have to say it right? But even if your page has no dead link, it will appear to be so in the eyes of robots if you use buttons to link to your other pages. It is more practical to just use the basic hyperlinks.
4) The page should be reachable from homepage by just two clicks.
5) No outgoing link to any bad website and even web page that is irrelevant to your page.
6) Any word should be written in text. Picture words or flash words cannot be recognized by search engine.
7) Try describe the page in the description tag. Anyway, it is better to leave the description tag blank if you want to just repeat the words in the title tag.
8) No hidden text (except description meta tag) and hidden link.
9) Construct "robots.txt" file correctly so that robots do not have to waste time crawling unnecessary parts of your website.
10) Let your URL appear as link on as many relevant websites (that do not employ 'nofollow' tag) as possible. This can be considered as marketing traffic too. Be careful on this one though, if your page permalink appears on web page that has different category than your page, your ranking in the search engine may decrease. Example: your page is about keeping coins but its permalink appears in a real estate page.
11) Do not repetitively bold the similar words in a page.
12) Canonicalize your URL.
13) The maximum number of characters in your URL should be 128.
14) Once your web page gets listed by the search engine, never ever change the URL of the page without a 301 redirect. It is not friendly to both search engine and your visitors.
15) Your URL should not have space. The space is seen by robot as '%20'.

Keywords meta tag is getting less important so you can just ignore it. Search engines nowadays are able to index every word in a web page.

To let your URL appear in as link on as many relevant website as possible (posting link on irrelevant website is on the the contrary not search engine friendly):
a) Write relevant and useful articles to submit to blog carnival and ezine. Always link back when your article is selected.
b) Participate in discussion in relevant forums or blogs (preferably those which rank high on the search engines for the same popular keywords as yours) by giving useful comment. People do not need you to just write "that's great", "well done", "interesting" etc there. And do not ever just post your URL there because it may be immediately seen as self-promoting spam. Your posting will be wiped off and you may be banned from the forum. Please post useful comment or constructive question first before posting your URL.  
c) Post your personal profile online, such as on some friend list management websites.
d) Post testimonials for other websites in their websites.
e) Link exchange. More on link exchange below.

Two types of link exchange:
a) Link only with the websites that rank high on the search engine result for the same popular keywords as yours (related content). Contact the owner of the website to negotiate this.
b) Sign up with free link / visit exchange coordinator website. The weakness with this type of link exchange is other websites who sign up generally have the same amount of traffic like you so it may not help much. For the visit exchange some coordinators will not display your website if you do not let other member's website that comes out randomly to load in your browser. This will generate useless hits because members will just let the website load and skip (denoted by 0-30s visit duration on your traffic stat). No targeted traffic. It is really boring that you need to view other people's website that does not suit to the things you are finding at that point of time. For those that have categorized list of websites, you still need to allocate some time to surf member's website to increase your ranking. The visitors are limited to only people that have website. Because other subscribers have their own website to promote, they may not help tell their friends about your website even it is very good. No matter how good the system is, there is still possibility that the subscribers just click to let the page loads up and skip. Do this only when you have extra time after improving your website and after employing other more meaningful traffic increase methods above. It is enough to sign up with just one of such coordinator websites. Important: Talk to if the company that displays ad on your website before signup and you may need to direct this kind of traffic to the page on your website that does not contain the ad. They do not want what I call reluctant traffic. Thru the visit exchange program, other subscribers visit your website not solely because they want to but also due to they want to earn some credits (some percentage of reluctance there).

Paid ad is essential for products only (especially seasonal or impulse products people look to buy in a particular period), not website. For example if you start to produce medium voltage switchgear and want to sell your product online, you cannot just rely on the word of mouth because there are not many people who know what medium voltage switchgear is.