Building a high-traffic web site should be the main focus of any business that intends to do substantial business online. High priced PPC campaign and thousands of dollars worth of SEO may not do what some of these simple techniques will do for your web site and your online business. Here are our top 10 suggestions for building a high traffic web site:

Word of Mouth: Make sure you provide a unique and genuine value to your customer and letting word of mouth do the rest. Your visitors can do wonders for you, not because you’re promising to pay them for advertising but because they like your web site and its contents. Research indicates that peoples are more receptive to online businesses that were referred to them by their friends and families. Let your existing customers build trust for your new customers.

Provide Valuable Content: Is your content worth reading by millions of people? Is it unique enough to captivate your visitors and make them come back for more? Remember, the sole purpose of content is to provide value to your visitors. Pay close attention to the words we have used. We’re talking about providing value to your “visitors”. You might say that your site provides value to your customers but why should it provides any value to someone who just stumble on your site with no intention to buy. Remember, 95% on the traffic on your web site is going to be generic visitors and if you could convert just 10% of this traffic into new customers, that’s almost 10%. That’s almost twice the size of your original customer traffic. That’s the importance of providing valuable content to visitors on your web site.

Further, When someone reads your content, their valuable time is spent on your web site and if they feel dissatisfied at the end of this visit, you aren’t going to see them again. Focus on providing real value instead of churning out disposable content and your readers will notice. And they’ll refer others to your site — in droves. Strong content is universally valued. It’s hard work to create it, but in the long run it generates lots of long-term referral traffic. Remember, quality and not the quantity is what you should focus one. You should prefer one outstanding article instead of 20 smaller and generic articles. Internet already contains more quantity than any one of us can absorb in our lifetimes, but there will always be a place for good quality content that stands out from the crowd.

Create Original Content: Original Content is another key. You may have valuable content on your site but if it is a copy of someone else work, visitors will sooner or later find the source of original content and leave your site. It takes more effort to produce original content, but it should be your long-term strategy. Remember, not everyone is a genius who could write captivating original content. If you don’t have great writing and composing skills, go find someone who does. Don’t try to be cheap by hiring $10/hr writers to finish this job. You will get what you pay for. If you don’t have enough budgets to pay for all the articles you need, start out with smaller number. Quality is what will get your web site going. So if you have $100 to spend, may be, get a single article written instead of 10 for $10 each. Also, make sure you understand the writers and what is their motivation for writing. If you make it clear to them that they are in your long term plans, they might write better content and work cheaper.

Create Timeless Content: If your content is time sensitive, you are setting up yourself for possible failure. Even if your content is good and unique, it is still of no use if it is not found by your visitors before the expiration window. Before you write anything or have someone write it for you, ask yourself a simple question. Will the content you’re creating today still be providing real value in 20-year, 50-year? If answer is “yes” then you have got a winner.

In terms of traffic building, timeless content connects with people at a deeper level than time-bound content. The latter is meant to be forgotten, while the former is meant to be remembered. Very little of today’s news will even be remembered next week, let alone a hundred years from now. Certainly some events are important, but at least 99% is irrelevant stuff when viewed against the backdrop of time and history.

Focus on Your Audience First, Computers Second: A lot has been written about the optimal strategies for strong search engine rankings in terms of content size, subject and update frequency. But your focus should be on the audience first and not on the technological stuff that can change tomorrow.
Customer based traffic-building strategy is better because it leaves you less vulnerable to shifts in technology. Everyone understands that Google ultimately wants to make it easy for its visitors to find valuable content, so your content strategy should be in alignment with Google’s long-term strategy.

Feature Your Site on Similar Sites: It's not always something you can rely on, but getting featured in some sort of popular site repository can serve as the launching pad for your site. It won't bring you traffic forever, but it might be enough to bring you just the right amount of exposure to get your initial audience going strong.

Keep them coming back(RSS feeds): The easiest traffic to get is the traffic that has already been to your site. Offer e-mail updates or RSS to keep your visitors coming back on a regular basis and keep them informed of major updates. And make sure your content stay fresh. Naturally, if you don't keep your content updated, you won't see any return visitors because there's nothing new for them to come back and see. Additionally, search engines will spider your site more frequently if your site is updated more frequently.

Keep it Simple and clean: Make sure your web site has a easy navigation and it is well structure. Don’t spend too much energy on cool effects and flash animations. Remember, most visitors have only few seconds before they decide to stay or leave on your web site. You want to get the information to them as soon as possible and present it in a easy to read simple format. Be careful about your title tags, headlines, directory/file names, and other semantically valuable tags can help ensure that a search engine can easily interpret what your site is about but could destroy all the intrinsic value of your web site. This means using clean semantic code to markup your content. This also means putting a little bit of serious thought into your naming conventions on your directory structure, files, and page titles.

Submit to Google Yahoo! and DMOZ: Submit an XML site map to Google. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of free webmasters tools offered by Google. It should give you an outsider perspective of your web site. Search engine ranking has high impact on your organic traffic so make sure you are listed in the search directories of popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

Link Exchange: Let’s make it very clear that link exchange doesn’t add directly to your organic traffic. Remember, organic traffic is based on the relevance of your content to the search keyword. However, link exchange is going to help you add more quality inbound link to your web site. This should improve your pagerank with search engines such as Google. Pagerank is a complex algorithms but be assured that in long terms, higher pagerank is going to help you move up in search results.

PPC and Paid advertising: Pay Per Click(PPC) can have positive impact on your business but you need to understand the nature of your business. Not everyone is going to benefit from PPC. Also, traffic from PPC is usually non reliable. There are click frauds to worry about and sometime customers don’t buy anything as you would have hoped. If you’re going to rely on PPC advertising, make sure you have your PPC campaign professionally managed. Any managed PPC campaign will cost you money but It will save you lot more money in long run.