There are a number of methods; some of the Traffic Exchanges let surfers not only choose the category into which their website fits, but also to choose the categories that they wish to visit; online directories give the opportunity to list your website in the appropriate category which makes it easier for potential visitors to find you; meta tags in your web page code will tell search engines how to categorise your page so that people who use those search terms will be directed to your site. That only works of course if the search engine happens to index your site and there's the rub. By far the greatest amount of traffic will come to you through the search engines but how do you make sure that your site is indexed?

Well, we've all heard of Search Engine Optimisation, in other words, making your website search engine friendly. Search engines send out "spiders" or "bots" to crawl websites and they are hungry for original content. If you have content on your site that doesn't appear elsewhere, you will make the spiders very happy and they will be more likely to index your site. If your pages contain nothing but content identical to that found on other websites, they may not be indexed, in fact the spiders may not even bother to crawl them.

The way to provide those hungry spiders with original content is to write articles which are closely related to the topic of your site, your "niche". Use keywords within your articles which reflect what you think are common search terms, which will help the spiders too. However, don't forget that your ultimate aim is to attract human visitors so don't overdo the keyword usage or your readers will become bored and leave your site for pastures new. Make sure, too, that the keywords you do use are relevant to the topic of your article. There's nothing more irritating than searching for "wild flowers" and finding yourself on a web page relating to interior design.

Your articles should be a minimum of 500 words and should be informative and authoritative. In this way, your visitors will learn to respect your views or the information you provide and will be inclined to return. If you sound like you know what you're talking about, they will also be more likely to take notice of your product recommendations and earn you some affiliate commissions.

This is just scratching the surface of the benefits of writing original content to publish on your website or in article directories, so look out for future articles which will look at planning and researching your articles, the importance of spelling and grammar and how to make the search engines notice your website.