No matter what you are selling or marketing, you can always use more eyes looking at your website. Of course there are ways to pay for traffic to your website and those methods are great but you can still get pretty far on a budget. In some cases, free website traffic is even better than traffic that you pay for. Paid traffic is often more focused on numbers of visits while the free website traffic methods I'm going to show you will be more about quality. Here are my favorite free methods for getting free website traffic_

1. Get on the search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing, the 3 major search engines, want to find your website and provide it as a result to their customers. Unfortunately, the search engines don't necessarily know you exist, especially new websites. Since the search engines are free, you do not have to pay them to get listed, you just have to submit your URL to their listings. If you have built a free website with WebStarts, search engines submission is included with a Pro Plus upgrade. This makes it even easier for you to get found… no work required! It is also recommended to submit your name to the search engines once a month for continued and accurate indexing. The WebStarts Traffic Booster takes the work out of this process as well. Simply purchase the traffic booster, let us know your URL and we will manually submit your name to the search engines once a month.

2. "Word of Mouth". When you have an offline business, you spread the word physically. You tell people about the business, give out business cards, put up signs or billboards, and get your friends and family to talk about your business. The same principle applies to the web. Since the web is a little different, you will follow the same idea but in different ways. You already know that you need to get a facebook and twitter account to connect with the people you know but there are many other ways to get it done. Try going to question and answer sites like Yahoo answers where users submit questions and answers. If someone is asking a question about your industry, answer it and suggest they check out your website. You can even drop a link to your site to make it easier to follow. Not only did you just help someone out, your answer is there for anyone searching the web to find it. This works on forums as well. These days, there is a forum for just about anything. If you can find something related to your industry, join the forum. Become an active member and leave a link to your site in your signature or in every post you submit. Not only have you left valuable information and a link to your site but you've also given the search engine more reason to think your site is reputable. If you are participating all over the web in discussion about your industry, the search engines will notice and rank you higher.

3. Make Partners. If you can find other websites or directories dealing with your industry, you can probably get your link on their site. Contact local businesses in your area and link swap with them. Consider contacting your chamber of commerce and getting your link listed there as well. If you have a page called 'our partners' and list other local businesses you interact with, they are very likely to return the favor by linking to your site. This will show more people that you exist and impress the search engines at the same time.

These are my 3 favorite ways to get free website traffic. Of course there are other ways of going about it so don't be afraid to try something new and be creative. As always, if you need to create a website, don't hesitate to check out WebStarts and build a free website today.