So we all know traffic is vital,

I am curious to know the history of how traffic has been garnered
and what new methods anyone has tried with any measure of success or failure
( and a brief description of why it failed or succeeded in your opinion)

who were the traffic lords of yesteryear, and who is the leading candidates in modern day?

when my site started i tried pretty much the basic ways ..

Link exchanges with other sites - beggin emails to big sites for links or plugs and pretty much just posted it were i could because of having no $$ to spend on getting it coming in

I soon learned that to get traffic myself and without money i would have to work hard and learn SEO , at the moment id say 60% of my traffic is now purely SEO

I put a lot into my seo and it seems to be paying off but ive read so many different ways of gaining traffic these days

tgps - yahoo / google / msn groups , seo , links exchanges and my new personal favourite Viral Marketing !

are spiders a key part of SEO? and what other than detailed descriptions of things on your site as metatags, can increase your seo ?

i used to * kinda work * for pornojunkies.com - i ran the seo forum for them for the two months they tested it out .. i could talk about seo all day and to be honest i still wouldnt be an expert .. i dont think anyone is an expert but things i would personally think are important for seo are

anchor text , descriptions , image names , img descriptions , page titles , page descriptions , meta tags , robot.txts to get the spiders coming back to update ur listings and well to be honest a lot more lol