Site Goals, Why do you want traffic? Before you go anywhere, you need to answer this question. You can break it down into :

1. What is your website about?
2. Who will visit it?
3. What will they gain?
4. What will you gain?

Write the answers on a piece of paper...no, really!

Unless you have a clear idea of why you are building a site, you'll struggle to make decisions later in the process of designing and publishing it. It's especially important to think about what your viewers will gain from visiting your site. The answer to this question will form the underpinning of your SEM efforts.

Now that you have thought some what about who is going to visit your site, we can talk about the "how."

Publishing your site is only a small step in the path to getting traffic. Unless you do something else, your site will just sit there, and no one will know it exists. Unfortunately, unlike the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams, "If you build it, they will come," is not true on the Web.

When we consider the bigger concept of SEM, we can split the different ways to get traffic into several main categories:

1. Organic. What was traditionally known as SEO, organic marketing is the idea of having your website visible in various search engines when people search for keywords.
2. Referral. Quite simply, the idea of having links from other sites to yours. A robust SEM plan will have a comprehensive link building strategy. These can be natural through attracting links to your high-quality content, or can be paid links or other techniques.
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC). This strategy involves bidding for placement on search results. Submitting an ad to a search engine such as Google also means that it appears on its distributed ad network, for example in Google's case, AdSense. So your ads will appear both in search results and on content sites.
4. Email. Building an email subscription list is a key part of a modern SEM plan. It's important to know who your website viewers are and if appropriate to capture their emails so that you can present them with information that might draw them back to your site.

If you want your website to be successful, it is absolutely critical that you have a balanced plan that addresses these four components. Just focusing on one will put you at a disadvantage to competitors that have a more balanced approach. It's exactly the same principle that your financial consultant might tell you: Have a diversified portfolio.