Building your site traffic is both an art and a science. The art side of the equation includes factors such as overall design, navigation and ease of use, all of which play a significant role in determining whether users find your site and keep coming back.

The science side is bit more concrete. Here are five surefire ways to ensure your site builds – and keeps – its traffic.

1. Search engine optimization. Most users find your site via search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. They type in an item of interest, hit the search key and find your site. That is, if your site is listed. The key to getting your site listed is something called search engine optimization (SEO). SEO includes a variety of semantic, design and technology enhancements that site publishers can implement in order to make it easier for search engines – and users – to find them. One caveat, however: Don’t go overboard and start using tricks like keyword saturation. Search engines are only concerned with one thing--providing the best, most relevant results. As a consequence, most have built-in algorithms that ferret out tricks like that and in some cases, ban the offending sites from the list. So stick to the tried-and-true. And don’t despair, but once your site is optimized, it may take a while to get picked up by the engines. On average, search engines take as long as six weeks before they even notice you and add you to their all-important results page.

2.  E-mail newsletters. E-newsletters are the ultimate Web traffic generators, especially for sites with strong content who are looking to build up their Web community. Just take that all-important content that you’re sure your visitors need and send it to them directly, right to their e-mail inboxes. This is also an attractive option because it enables you to track how readers are interacting with your content. Do they just view the newsletter, or do they actually click on story headlines to read more? Savvy site publishers measure the results and then tweak their content – resulting in even more site visitors.

3. Advertising. Although some dispute the merits of banner advertising, recent studies have shown that it works in bolstering site traffic. Think about it. Today’s professionals can spend nearly five hours of their working day connected to the Internet. That’s five hours of surfing Web sites that could have your banner ad attached. Another traffic-generating form of advertisement is pay-per-click, where you pay search engines to list your ads alongside search results. Both methods are proven to improve your site traffic.

4. Reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are links with other sites that are generally related to yours. You link to a site, and that site’s Webmaster returns the favor and links back to yours. It effectively adds another potent avenue for your site visitors to find and reach you. The best part is that once you have a reciprocal link in place, it seldom if ever gets taken down. Think about it -- that's free advertising practically for the life of your site.

5. Fresh content. No matter how much you invest in various traffic-generating schemes, visitors won’t come – and won’t stay – unless you have compelling content that gets updated on a regular basis. It’s free and it works.