Everyone wants more traffic to their sites. Bottom line is, you can have the single greatest product in the history of man, but if people dont see it they wont buy it. I will give a few tools I have used with decent success. Best of all, almost all of them are totally FREE.

One thing to make sure you do, before even starting any kind of web promotion, is keyword research. I cannot stress this enough, and I learned the hard way. You need to make sure the keywords you are concentrating on are the key ones people use when searching on the main search engines. After all, there is no point on concentrating on a set of keywords that rarely or never have been used. You will go through all the effort, but it will not make much of a difference because no one uses those phrases in association with your niche.

One way to back into this is to get an adwords account with Google, then go see what terms are being actively bid on, and the expected search volume. Others have done the research, use their time and effort to make yours much easier.

In addition, and this can be a big help, get a web address url that includes top keywords, if possible. For example (a simple one), if you have a site about model airplanes, you could call it coolflying.com. This sounds great, but no one will type in cool flying looking for a model airplane site. Now if you changed the url to be : www.flying-model-airplanes.com you probably have 2 top keywords in your url, which helps alot for ranking in the engines when people type that exact phrase to search with. Granted its not always easy as most of the good ones are gone. However, if you have the choice and it makes sense for your site, its worth looking into.

Here are a few good tools:

1. Qassia.com - this is like an article directory on steriods. Users submit what the site calls Intel, which is basically articles. In addition, each article gets its own link associated with it at the bottom, and all links are NOT marked as nofollow, meaning they are quality backlinks. The site is currently PR5, but I am sure that will grow once its not beta anymore. Users get Q$ for every article/intel they submit. The best part is the amount you are rewarded is graded by the community. Each submission is graded by 12 separate users in a random basis. The score you get is then quantified into Q$. The more Q$ you have, the higher your site placement is. Plus, the best part, you can re-publish stuff you have created on your blog, website, or even sent into article directories. Granted you get a bit less for these, but that is a way to turbo charge your account in the beginning. Once you have your Q$ built up, you can allocate them between the various site links. The more Q$ you allocate to a particular site, the higher it ranks in Qassia. Every artilcle you submit gets a ref= dofollow, so this is a great way to get some links - JUST MAKE SURE THE ARTICLE IS ORIGINAL BY YOU AND HAS NOT BEEN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED OR YOU WILL GET BANNED FROM THE SITE.

Anyone who wishes to try out Qassia.com needs to click this link, Site is now open to the public at large.

2. One Way SEO links - this is a free site that has about 270 search engines that you can submit your site to. It simplifies the manual entry of your site into projects. Plus once you refer 3 people to sign up (and its free) you get access to much higher PR ranked engines to submit to. One caveat - some of the sites want you to pay for submission (fully disclosed when you open the link), I completely skipped all those. Even said it has been very good to submit all my sites, and I have noticed a difference in traffic in just a few weeks. A lot of the submission engines are already PR2-5 so its not bad for free. In my opinion never ever pay for something that you can do for free. The website is onewayseolinks.com. Most of the engines listed in this tool are very small and most likely will never search out your site and find it on their own. If you have done a ton of other stuff and still need some more backlinks, this is a decent source.

3. Ezine - This is a large article directory that allows you to submit articles related to your niche and include a link at the bottom. Once you submit a few (they dont say exactly how many) quality articles, the submission process is much faster. Currently it probably takes about 10 - 12 days from when you submit the article to when its published. Most of this is because each article is hand screened to keep out total junk. This is an excellent way to get some backlinks as other sites will grab this content over time and republish on different URL and IP address. Site is http://www.ezinearticles.com/

Additionally, there are tons of other niche article directories such as My Article Directory. These are very good for finding and posting stuff directly into niche categories, and is another great free tool to use when looking to build up backlinks.  It allows you to post unlimited articles for free and additionally to receive new content as it is posted by email on only the exact niches that interest you.

4. Social Network Bookmarks - This includes Del.icio.us, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Diigo and several others. These can be valuable tools, but like everything they take time to go on each, make a post, then log into the next and repeat. If you have 10-20 sites or more and want to make a post, this can take days or even weeks to post to all of the different sites. There is an easier way to post to ALL of them at the same time. Onlywire.com has the most popular social networks (huge list) and AUTOMATES posting to all of them at the same time. Best of all, yet again, its FREE (used to be, now I think its 2.99 per month, but saves a ton of time). This tool alone saves hours and hours of work. Sure you have to set it up to begin with, but once its done its super easy to use and submit new info to all your accounts across all the social networks at once.

5. Squidoo - This is similar to the way Hubpages works in that it allows easy creation of web pages, which they call lenses. Each lens gets a ranking, based on several factors including user ratings and traffic. Like Hubpages,Squidoo.com allows users to share in ad revenue that might be generated by your lenses and add Amazon to sell some stuff related to your lens. The best way to use Squidoo is to make a bunch of lenses with information related to your niche, then include links to your relevant sites in the links tab on the lens. Like Hubpages, its a community so you are going to want to get involved by searching for others who have created similar lenses and see what they are up to. Basically the more ratings, comments, lensrolls and favorites your lens has, the higher it will rank in Squidoo.

6. BlinkWeb - This is a new service designed expressly for website promotion. It basically makes it super easy to create web pages with Optin forms, video, testimonial boxes, order buttons, checkmarks and a whole lot more. Blinkweb.com includes tons of templates as well, making is super easy for anyone to get a web page up. Best of all, this tool is entirely designed for site promotion, so you dont have to worry about any issues like you do on hubpages, squidoo, and similar where they frown upon that.

7. MyArticleNetwork - This is a newer site that is probably the single best tool I have ever used for getting a huge amount of back links in a 100% legit, google friendly way. There are 2 ways to use this site. Site owners can use it for FREE, and get regular new content posted to their site. The best part is you can pick the exact niche you want, so you know the information is relevant. Additionally, you get to approve all articles that get posted - if you dont like it, reject it and it never hits your site.

However, the best part of MyArticleNetwork is the network of over 10,000 blogs from all over the world that you can post your articles to, each with up to 3 back links. I have personally used this to crack into the top 10 rankings on many niche sites on Google and a few very hard ones (where the search term comes up with 38mil sites). This tool is a definite must for anyone looking to drive traffic to your site. Sure it costs a bit per month, but I know from first hand experience not only does it work, you get real, measurable results.  Articles are dripped into the system over time, building up links in a natural fashion.

Check this one out: MyArticleNetwork

Granted, these are but a few of the ways to drive traffic to your site. Either way, its AT LEAST a six month commitment to see results. After all Google, Yahoo and others dont scan every site every day for links - so its a waiting game. Plus you have to target different keywords over time to maximize your engine ranking. Also, even if you could flood the web with all of it in 5 minutes, most of the engines are smart enough that they will discount too much in too little time as trying to game the system. You want it to build naturally, over a longer time to appear as natural as possible.