This list is simply my top 5 ways to direct new traffic to a website, this list is not proven or based on any research, it is simply what I have found to work best for me in the past.

1. SEO

Some may be suprised by SEO being #1. It doesn't directly improve your traffic, that’s true, but without it you will never improve your traffic. If you want to be ranked highly in search engines you will have to optimize your site, when was the last time a full flash site ranked #1 under any of the searches you performed?

2. Write Articles

This is hands down the best free way to improve traffic to your site, write at least one article every week, that's a minimum of 52 articles a year, do the calculations, you write 52 articles each one is viewed 50 times a day (this can be more or less depending on how many article directories you submit your site to) this is potentially five hundred thousand views of your article per year. You probably wont see many direct visitors from the sites you post your articles on at first, but the reciprocal links and the potential reputation you can develop online from article syndication is priceless.

3. Pay for Traffic

This option doesn't look very desirable to most people, especially those just starting out with out much of a bank roll, but as long as you get your traffic from the right place it can really get your site noticed. Don’t waste your time with buying hits from traffic exchanges or any “Paid to” sites, try google adwords, if your selling a product or have an affiliate site this could be the perfect way to up your sales.

4. Directory Submissions

Directory submissions can be the most tedious task to promoting a site, manual submissions can take a very long time, there are many pieces of software available online to handle this for you, the majority of which I wouldn't trust but to each there own. Also paying for manual submissions is an option, very cost affordable depending on who you approach for the job and can up your page rank in no time. I have recently found someone on a popular webmaster forum “Digital Point” for a small fee (less than $10) he was willing to manually submit on of my new sites to 50 high PR directories, the results have been great so far and can only get better.

5. Social Bookmarking

Last but not least, social bookmarking sites have become the most popular promotional tool for all webmasters, a great way to give your site a quick traffic boost. This refers back to #2 any article you’ve written and added directly to your site is a great page to promote on a site like “Digg” or “Reddit”. I have recently read an article about someone who wrote an article and submitted it to “Digg” over the next 48 hours they received over an 8500% increase in visitors to the site. That's a powerful promotional tool.

Now you know my favorite ways to quickly promote a new site and get it on the map, these tips may work better for some than others but in the end everyone will find their own ways to jump start a new site.