[interested]

What are some of the most practical (but cost efective) ways to get more traffic to a website? Choosing the right keywords and achieving an improved ranking appear to be of growing importance as web traffic increases.

[Dana]

Definitely!
I would also do a lot of self promotion of your site. Add the url to your signatures lines, offer reciprocal linking to related sites, take advantage of tagging, pinging and social bookmarking as well as working to keep your content rich and fresh so that you get indexed.
A mini PPC blast or blog marketing are controllable lower budget items that may help you too.
Good luck!

[mycoffee]

Content is king. If you update your site regularly with good contents, you expect more site visits. Also, make your site search engine friendly by "calibrating" dynamic pages.

[victory365]

Anything you can do yourself will be cost effective but make sure you are doing the right things. On-page optimization is just as important as off-page. Make sure you have all your on-page factors taken care of before you start promoting your site. That way when your site does get spidered the search engines will see all your content and know what it's about. Then go out and start doing the Page Ranking work.

[mann3r]

The best and proven way to drive traffic to your site, is hold a competition like what precharge is doing, another one is thru contest. as for optimization, content definitely play a big role.

[Alur3n]

This thread should be in the Search Engine Optimization forum.

I'd say the most important thing is get LOTS of backlinks, on relevant pages.

[thebookish]

All of that is so important, you should try each and every way that would get you some visitors, all would help.

[ScottHughes]

Backlinks! The most important aspect of promotion is getting links to your site placed all over the net.

Having a site with few or no links to it is like having a brick-and-mortar store with no roads to it.