Whats the best way to get people to view my online portfolio? web traffic?

[Tony]

There are three primary ways of getting traffic on the internet:

1. Backwards Links (Back links)
This is the process of getting other sites to link back to your site. The best links come from sites with high page rank and use the keywords that you are targeting with your website. You can build these manually or rely on others slowly finding you and linking to your page.

2. Paid Advertising
This is the process of buying advertising space on different sites and/or using pay per click (PPC) services from different places, particularly large search engines. It is fast, but if you are competing in high volume areas can become expensive quickly.

3. Organic Ranking
This is creating content and relying on people to find it, whether via search engines, forums, or creating articles, etc.

For your site, I would recommend a combination of networking to get backward links pointing to your site and paid advertising.

In the long run, a combination of organic ranking and building backwards links is normally the best approach, but your site has some fundamental flaws which would make doing so harder than it should be.

1. Your domain name is not very good for organic ranking.
It would be much better to do keyword research to find out the words that people are actually using when they seek out freelance designers and then getting a domain that had at least one or two of those words contained within it. If you really want to build your name up, something like richardreevefreelancedesigner.com would be a better choice.

Fortunately, most hosts allow you to park domains on top of existing sites, so that multiple domain names point to the same site.

2. Your site looks to be rather static.
I would recommend adding a blog to it and posting semi regular examples of some of your designs. I would also recommend putting up examples of each type of item you note that you design, so that potential clients can preview your portfolio online.

WordPress works great for such, and you could fit it in by installing it in a sub-directory ( perhaps /blog ) and creating a link from the main page to it.

There are a wide variety of methods for getting more traffic, but not all of them are going to be very useful without a site designed to take advantage of them.

If you really want to keep your site as it is, I'd recommend starting with:
* Search engine submissions
* Directory submissions
* Creating Squidoo lenses and/or Hub Pages
* Using twitter to talk about new designs
* Tracking down designer forums on the internet and entering into conversation on topics which interest you.

Personally, I'd get another domain, install a blog, and take advantage of RSS, feed aggregators, and article marketing as well.