Driving website traffic to your website is unquestionably vital online. Put simply, no online business could live without Website traffic. So if you are looking to make money online, there is one essential skill you simply have to master -the art to generating Website traffic. There are of course a number of other skills you will have to discover, like the art of copywriting and being able to split-test to find out what works.

The greatest sort of traffic you could ever acquire is of course free targeted website traffic. However, the free traffic scene can be very wasteful. Lots of free website traffic sources on the Web are not targeted enough. Free ad posting forums, free newsletter ads, even traffic exchanges... Every one of these methods is not great in generating targeted traffic. Yes, they may create a few sales and leads for you, but the potential return on your time investment won't be great. Unless you value your time at $3 an hour or less, in that case these methods don't warrant your time or effort.

But there are a number of proven methods to generate free website traffic which could potentially 'destroy your servers' and cause your bandwidth to exceed (in a decisive way). The two methods are - search engine optimization (or SEO) and of course article marketing.

If you build a website blog or web site and try to reach the top ranks within the search engines for competitive keywords, you will attract heaps of free website traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The search engines are the starting point for lots of Internet surfers which are searching for information, so you without doubt need to be in those high search ranking positions, the higher you are the more traffic you attract.

Article marketing (the formula of composing and distributing of articles to lots of article directories) will bring in huge dividends. Sometimes 50% of your traffic will happen from the use of article directories themselves, which themselves draws thousands if targeted visitors to their site every day!