Real life has yellow pages book or a catalog, that has a list of all "places" in a city like hair cutting, car rentals, pet shops, and so on arranged alphabetically. There is no "traffic" in those listings included. But with money you get a bigger ad on the page and all the others are without a picture. A one page contains so much places that you can get a good proportion of all the places in a category in one to a few pages. I think this kind of categorizing of shops and places would be nice in SL too. And you would not need the traffic system, which would reduce campers. The campers could go find better jobs.
This means that the categorizing system would have to be arranged into SL. There could be really much subcategories (eg. hairs, pets, vehicles, amusement parks) under main categories (eg. shops, services, parks). You could list all of the categories at once, or you could browse only categories from a certain main category.
Then your place could have only one category. For example your shop could be a "clothes" or "hairs" or "mall". Or then you could buy more categories for your place with money, if you sold both clothes and hairs. And then all players could select from the hierarchical category tree for example shopping -> apparel -> hairs, which would then open a list of hair shops and places that sell hairs. All those hair shops that have paid extra would have bold text, and those shops that have paid even more would have a star. A picture of the shop would open as usual when you select a shop, and everyone could have one picture. Maybe additional pictures for the extra categories.
People could still use the old search from the plain descriptions of places, which would have no traffic. Instead the old search would list places by the bolds and stars from the new categories system instead.
The new categories system would make the life easier for the people who just clearly know what they want for example the hairs or pets. People would also get luxury service with a star or ordinary service with a plain item.