Traffic. It's what we all are striving for. Every webmaster designs their site with visions of people flocking to it. Unfortunately it takes a little more work than submitting your link to Google and Yahoo.

First of all, patience is the name of the game. Too many people give up too soon. It takes time and you have to be willing to keep on plugging along even though your traffic that day was 5 people. If you don't have patience, you probably will give up before you achieve any kind of success.

Another important thing is content. You need content for your visitors and the search engines to take you seriously. Use your meta tags and content to let everyone (and the search engines) know what your site is about.

And now to the heart of this article. Exchanging links is the job you will probably spend the most time doing. The more quality, relevant links you have going to your website, the better the search engines will like you, which increases your chances of coming up higher in searches. So what is the easiest way to find relevant websites to exchange links with?

Find a web tool that pulls up backlinks. Type in the URL of your competition. You will find out who is linking to them and have a list of prospects for relevant links to your website!

When approaching prospects for link exchanges, always be courteous. It is a good idea to place a link to their website first and mention this to them in your email. Don't place their link on a page that has a hundred other links on it and all on different subjects. Definitely don't use a links page that is full of banners. Your links pages should be well organized and categorized with a limited number of links on each page (preferably 25 or less). Target websites whose content is similar to yours as relevant links are more valuable for you and the person you wish to exchange links with.

While building up relevant links can be time consuming and monotonous, the pay off is worth it. More traffic.