If you concentrate on building traffic to your site through newsletters and sales landing pages and other forms of marketing then eventually your SEO efforts will be easier as your site is already getting traffic and has some reputation and backlinks, so your SEO efforts will not be as hard for when trying to rank for certain keyphrases. This is why sites that have age are also easier to optimise then sites that are new.
To help you through the process you can use Traffic Travis or any other SEO tools to monitor your progress and find what is already working for you.
To start gaining exposure from scratch it is much easier then a few years before as there are more resources available but on the other hand is more competition and websites being uploaded each day, so more eyeballs are needed to keep up with it all.
But as a starting point everyone is generally familiar with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so you can easily start off with creating fan pages and groups and tweets then lead their way into other forms of promotion, including press coverage and authority listings from associations they are related to.
You can join Traffic exchange programs such as Traffic Python aswell if you really want to go down the desperate stage but to be honest I don’t really recommend it. Either way you go just stay away from blackhat methods of getting traffic as this can get your IP banned from certain data centres and in the long run do more harm then good.
Overall concentrate on getting the word out about your site, through various methods that you feel comfortable with either online and offline and you will naturally find your Alexa increase the more visits you get. Natural visitors are the best forms of visitors and over time will get sites linking to you. When they link to you you can then ask them to change the Anchor text of the link you have with them. It’s much easier to tweak and get existing links to be set up the way you want then to find new ones. So just keep this in mind aswell!
Last but not least just go crazy on adding content, the more content you have in your site the more pages you will have indexed in the search engines and more chance you will have with your site being informative and rich of quality content, leading site owners bookmarking your site and remembering your site to keep going back to when they are in need, so with this in mind your Alexa will always be on the rise!
Good Luck and be sure to leave your experiences behind and for those who would like to get Alexa installed be sure to download the Firefox Alexa sparky extension
Be different
I have one 
Well first of all most big websites out there these days have hundreds of mini sites or sites that they have established that are relevant and link to their main site. This is good if the sites that are linking in are from different ip addresses as it tells the search engines that they are not necessarily from the same owner.




















