Getting Traffic/ What Should You Spend Time or Money On?

The methods to increase your traffic are everywhere. Many of them cost you money and the others cost only your time. The question is, which methods are worth your time or money? Should you spend a great deal of money on directory listings? Should you bother to pay for backlinks? Should you pay to optimize your website?

Directory listings:

I have found that having your site link on a directory is worth the usually small amount you pay. If you are going to do this, make sure that you are paying for PR 4 or up directories. These ones usually do charge for putting your site in their directory but these sites will show up in searches as well. That is the point so why not do it? You can also manually put your site in free directories and it doesn't hurt to do that either. The more the merrier. Here are some of the ones that show up in searches most often that are reasonable to purchase:

gpanimation.com
seekabove.com
5lbs.com
1any.com
creativeagency.com
etup.org
premiumsites.org
bsaadmail.com
apexoo.com
freewd.org

Backlinks:

I personally do not think this has helped me much. I did pay for a listing of backlinks to high PR sites and found that nothing came of it. The cost was cheap but it was a lot of work for very little result.

Article Submissions:

Absolutely the best way to get your site in searches. There are very good posting sites for you to submit articles to and you will get traffic back when people click your url in the resource box. Some of my favorites are:

Ezine Articles
Hub Pages
Zimbio
Digg
Idea Marketers
Articles Galore
Article Alley
Article Base

As for getting your site to the best quality it can be and getting rid of broken links and other problems that will hurt your ratings in searches, I highly recommend you invest in or at least try the trial version of :

Deeptrawl

I also recommend you get a membership with Engineseeker.com. They make it easy to track your sources of traffic and find out what is working and what is not. They also have packages to help you get traffic on major search engines. Well worth the time it takes to sign up.