After quality content, traffic is the most important part of a website. Traffic refers to the number and frequency of visits that occur on your website. The more visitors you have on your website, the more money you can make with your website, or the more people that you will be able to share your ideas with. But how do you drive traffic to your website?

Driving traffic to your website is as much an art as it is a science. To drive traffic to your website, you have to spend some time thinking about how people find your website and ways that you can market your website to those people. Some of the most common ways to drive traffic to your website can include:

Article marketing. Posting articles to article directories like Helium, EzineArticles, Associated Content or eHow can help web surfers to find your web site. This is because those article directories link back to your web site via the author's page, in the case of paying sites like Helium, or they may even have links to your website in the articles themselves, as you can do with EzineArticles.

Search Engine Marketing. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of making a website more friendly to search engines such as Google and Yahoo. SEO includes things like using keywords, and having those keywords appear within an article at a certain rate or "density." There are other aspects to SEO, as well, like the way that you link between pages on your web site and even the number of pages on your website. Optimizing your website will help drive traffic to your website from search engines.

Blog marketing. While blogs can certainly be used to make money or to spread an idea in their own right, blogs can also be used to promote and drive traffic to your website. You can link to your website from a blog, or use your blog to talk about the various products or pages on your website. In some cases, you may find that you are actually more effective with your blog than you were with the website you were trying to drive traffic to in the beginning.

While there certainly are other ways to drive traffic to your web site, the above methods have been proven to be effective time and time again.