Every webmaster wants to know how to get increased website traffic to their website for free. Many pay for traffic because it’s easier and doesn’t take time. If you have a lot of time at your disposal, I wouldn’t bother paying for traffic.

How to increase web traffic for free:

1) SEO (search engine optimization): You may hate the idea of learning something complicated like SEO, but this one is usually the most important. The long term passive traffic model resulting from SEO, makes it more important than any other thing you can do for free. Any work done here is greatly rewarded long term and requires little to no maintenance work in the future, once you have fully optimized your site.

2) SMO (Social media optimization): This is using the social networks such as Digg, Stumbleupon, Netscape, etc to your advantage. SMO gives mixed results as some websites work better than others on social networking sites. For example a store or e-book site, is unlikely to have any value on these social networks, compared to a picture gallery site. Sites that do well on social networking are usually interesting and have original creative content. Some people go all out to get good ranks in these social networks because of the big boost in traffic.

3)Link Exchanges: Share blogroll links with blogs of similiar topics.

4) Backlink building: The main purpose to getting backlinks consistently from many sources, is not to get direct traffic from the actual site, but to rank higher in search engines.

5) Write content: What does writing have to do with promoting? The more content you have in the search engines the more traffic you will get from them.