One problem with websites is that they often go neglected or don't get updated for extended periods of time. This is a surefire way to reduce your rankings on the search engines and not maximize your traffic potential.

Making a website and building a traffic stream is probably one of the hardest things you can do as a webmaster. There are however some great ways which have proven themselves to me over and over again to gain traffic and slowly improve your rankings.

Set goals for your website. This statement may sound silly, but if you are driving to get 10,000 hits a day, you have to work at it. Don't expect to put up a small website and instantly have traffic flow towards it. One of the techniques that has proven to be the most effect way of building long term traffic growth is to set a daily or weekly quota for what I want to accomplish on my website.

Personally, I aspire to write two or three articles each day and add them to my website. It doesn't seem like very much to do, only an hour or so of work each day. Most webmasters are tweaking and working on their website far more than that each day. You may ask yourself, why would I want to do this every day? Have you ever heard the term, "Every long journey begins with the first few steps." The same goes for building a website. If you were to add two or three pages a day, by the end of the year you would have between 700 and 1100 pages on your website!

Imagine that for every page you put on your website you got one or two hits a day. As you add more and more pages you are going to see more and more traffic flow. Sure each article may still only get one or two hits each, but when you website has several hundred pages that really doesn't seem to matter as much!

Adding good content to your website and expanding your website daily is a truly effective way to build traffic over time. Yes, it takes work. Yes, it takes time. But when you reach your goals and attain what you want to in the end, it will all be worth the effort.

Hard work pays off.