To those of you who founded large websites, what stirred the most amount of growth in your site's history? Was it a mention in a local magazine or e-zine? etc. For us, it has just been a constant effort and struggle together with a lot of SEO and making contacts in the industry - not really one thing that lead to an instant burst of traffic.

I've seen a doubling of traffic with basic on page and off page SEO. But then my site is hardly are 'large one'

What sort of SEO techniques do you use? Link swaps? Purchase "artificial" PR by buying links on high PR sites?

I followed SEO-Guy's tutorial as best I could and tried to get as many themed links as possible.

SO this comprised:

Targetting 1-3 keyword/phrases per page
Optimising <Title>
Optimising <h1>,<h2> tags
Using JS links to stop PR leakage to pages I didn't want to get PR
And most importantly, using themed links internally and externally.

This saw me jump into the top 10 for a couple of what I thought were tough keywords. My BL have only gone from 10 to about 40 along the way.

Driving traffic is hard but if you get quality visitors and if you have a quality website that is consitantly updated with new content then you will have alot more returing visitors/customers. There are many ways to create returing visitors e.g. Newsletters, forums, useful content/ products etc.

I think good content and SEO both play significant role to attract more viewers as well as retain them longer.

if you have like every keyword say over 2000, will that help?, or would it be worse.

It would be much worse. It's a "black hat" seo technique called "keyword stuffing" that the search engines can easily track and penalize you for. Meta tags are very overrated nowadays - they do little, if anything.

In fact most of the SEO expert consider that MSN and Yahoo tolerate heavier keyword densities per page than search engine leader google. However there is lot of debate on this issue. I hope Meta tags still have some life left in them relatively important factor by SE though.

My traffic has been driven by a variety of things, including press, word of mouth, google, and other relevant sites linking to me.

Most recently, however, most of my traffic has been a result of newspaper articles about my site. On tuesday, there's going to be an article about me and my site in the health section of the Washington Post (I think its front page cause there is gonna be a color photo of me). Check it out.

By the way, I wonder what inpspired you to creat this topic, cscgal. ;-)