You can have the best website in the world and not make one thin dime if you are not driving enough traffic to it.
Imagine building a new Superstore where you sell great products at low prices and you have excellent customer service. It can't fail to make you a plie of money, right? Now, imagine that it is located in the middle of the Nevada desert, 100 miles from the nearest town. Will you be surprised when nobody shows up? This is what a new website is like.
Maybe a few hikers wander in by chance. This would be the Internet equivilent of random search traffic, sparse and sporadic. Your website will not survive on this.
The second method of getting traffic would be something like this: You go to the nearest city and pay someone to convince people to come by and checkout your store. The Internet equivilent here is Paid Advertising or Pay Per Click (PPC). This can be very effective but the trade-off is that it can be expensive.
The third option is to build some nice roads to your new store and put up lots of signs directing people to your location. In Internet terminology this is called Organic Traffic and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You pay for the roads and signs but after that the traffic is all free. Obviously this is the most desireable form of traffic.
In the real world webmasters use a vast array of tactics and products, both paid and organic, to drive traffic to their sites. In fact, there is a bewildering number of options to choose from; some effective and some worthless. Here are some reviews:
Search engine optimization
