Make no mistake, search engine optimization (SEO) is a very key element in successful traffic generation strategies, and proper SEO that leads to higher rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs) can have a major impact on the volume of targeted traffic to websites - but it's equally important to keep it in perspective. There are a great number of ways to drive targeted traffic to sites and blogs, and spending too much time on SEO tasks will prevent you from getting the most possible traffic to websites you're promoting.
Your website promotion activities should include a lot of different ways to drive free traffic to websites, especially those promotional efforts that have proven to be successful long-term traffic generating strategies. Effective article marketing tops the list of long-term traffic generation techniques, since article submissions made 5 and 10 years ago still get exposure today, and many of those older articles have been consistently driving traffic to websites for years now. Time spent on article writing and submitting articles to a top article directory like EzineArticles will often rival, and can surpass, the effectiveness of spending the same amount of time on SEO activities when it comes to driving targeted traffic to websites.
Newer forms of e-marketing like social media marketing and social networking are also powerful ways to get more visitors to websites and blogs. Using the Twitter social network, the Facebook social network, etc... can be a major source of targeted traffic and targeted leads, with the bonus of being a great forum for branding yourself, your company and your website.
And when driving web traffic to blogs, your RSS feed opens up whole new avenues of website traffic generation. Blogging software creates and updates a feed that lists each new post you make, and that feed is referred to online as an RSS feed. While websites are limited to search engines and similar directories for promotional purposes, blogs can use those and a growing number of directories that only accept information from RSS feeds. As such, submitting your blogs' RSS feeds to as many of these directories as you can is one more online promotional activity that often outweighs SEO efforts in your efforts to increase website traffic.
And the list goes on and on - press releases, banner advertising, linking strategies like blog commenting, reciprocal linking and social media bookmarking, forum marketing, affiliate program marketing - each can have a profound effect on driving traffic to websites and increasing blog traffic. But each takes time, which is why your e-marketing plan can't be too heavily weighted in favour of the search engines and SEO activities.