I thought it would make for good discussion to see all the different elements that contribute to site growth, and perhaps spark some ideas as well.

We targeted our exact market.

We now sit at the top of Yahoo for "increase traffic"

We have optimized our pages going after exact terms and keeping ourselves as far away from black hat tactics as possible.

With that said you must know what black hat is and how to use it in order to understand why it works.

This will allow you stay within the boundries of TOS and optimizie your pages effectively.

We have used our own product in our quest for #1 on the major search engines for our terms and so far it has been amazing. The results of ourselves for one and more importantly the out pouring of support and praise form our customers who are haivng the same success.

Our plan of attack was simple. Relative inbound links, I cannot stress this enough that Google does not like a Site selling Socks to be linked to a site selling Car tires... and it will hurt your popularity overall.

We optimized tags proeprly and basically wrote our own articles as we went along as to what is working and what is not.

We kept everyone in the loop and are now a very successful Software Development company serving the world for its SEO needs.

Extremely happy with our perfomance. We are also looking to get rid of our Hosting divison because of such success along the dev divison.

Sorry for the long drawn out reply.

Add some motivation factors for your visitors as to make them feel that they are touching your product or service when they visit your site.

Can you please explain what you mean when you say "touching your product"? Do you mean that they feel like they are so close they just HAVE to have it? Or perhaps that they're making a difference? I'm confused.

cscgal, you are absolutely right! Touching your product means they should feel they are so close to it and to have it without making delay. Perhaps daniweb is like that :cheesy:

Oh goodie! I was right about something today

Every person is complete, perfect and whole, just few things are missing with us.

My site is smaller than yours. I run a forum site with only about 2000 members. I also have a couple technology sites. Here are the things that caused a rise in traffic:

• PR Web press release -- steady upturn in traffic
• Posting comments to blogs -- small to huge spike in traffic (I was surprised to see OS News give me a big spike, I didn't really think that site had big traffic)
• Posting comments in forums like this one -- steady influx of new visitors (I get maybe 1 to 5 visitors/day from each site I post to, and I post to maybe 10 sites... and they keep coming even after a two-week lull in posting)
• Doing bloggy stuff (RSS, posting in Blogger Forums) -- small spikes in traffic
• Google Adwords -- BANG! Steady, reliable traffic, in high volume if I want it.
• SEO -- I wish this would result in as much traffic as Adwords does. It's clearly cheaper.

Regarding SEO, I found that I got much better rankings and more prevasive listings after I put my "magazine dossier" online. That is, one of my sites has a page of info for each magazine in its database, and there are over 1000 magazines listed. Those listings were private. I made them visible to Google, and Google liked that.

I imagine it's equivalent to making many articles available for Google to index.

However, to be honest, it hasn't resulted in a huge spike in traffic. In fact, if I were to stop my Adwords ads, I'd probably have a fifth of the traffic I do now. But I still don't do SEO very well. I'm learning.

Also, link exchanges haven't done squat for me. I'm probably going to try a custom one soon.

-Tony

Those are good points, but most of people are already doing that, I am in need of some tips that make a site clickable and to increase overall the conversion rate.

My website has no content, no forum and no product...
but that is part of the challenge.
BTW most of the traffic comes from fora and a bit from blogs. I should also mention top lists and a bit of advertising. I could jump to 500 UV if I was willing to spend more than $5 a day.