There are a couple of different methods to increase traffic to your website without purchasing a thing. Here I endeavour to create a list of free ways to gain traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of making sure your site is optimized for search engines. This allows the search engines to crawl your site much easier, which in turn increases the amount of links that get indexed for your site. Many free sites such as blogger and wordpress have some amount of default SEO immediately present in their platform, whereas others you have to do yourself. With SEO, you want to consider several things.

• How many inbound links does the site have?
• How many valid outbound links does the site have?
• What is the keyword density?
• Of the sites linking to your site, what is their page rank?

The hardest part of SEO is trying to get inbound links to your content from other, highly ranked pages. This makes your site look better in the eyes of Google, and increases the chances you will make it to the front page - which is obviously your goal.

Keyword density is also important. Try to target specific keywords with your posts or site and you will find that as long as you don't over do it, the search engine traffic will come about.

Entrecard

Entrecard is a free service that allows bloggers and website owners to network with eachother and put ads for their site on eachothers site. It sounds kind of cheesy at first, but let me express to you that it cannot be looked down on.

After registering, you go to other entrecard members' sites and drop your card on their widget. This earns you one entrecard credit, or EC for short. You can drop up to 300 cards per day, and you can drop them wherever you want, as long as the site has a widget. You cannot drop on the same person twice in one day.

Sites are assigned popularity and advertising costs which are paid in EC. For instance, a site could have an advertising cost of 8 ec, all the way up to 2048 ec. The advertising cost is decided based on unique views, card drops, and other information determined by entrecard.

Essentially, you network with other people, drop cards, sell your advertising spot, and purchase advertising on other people's spots all for free, using EC. It is a great traffic tool, and I recommend trying it out for a couple weeks. It is not right for everybody - but it's free, so you don't lose anything for trying it out.

Writing Quality Content

I know, I know, this one seems obvious. I just put it in here to reiterate on the fact that quality content brings readers. People share things they read that they find interesting or of some value. Don't write posts or put things on your site just because you feel you need to get a post done that day. Doing this will decrease the quality of your post, generally speaking, and sometimes push potential readers away. Try your damndest to make every post the best post you could possibly make, and you'll be amazed at the results.

Comment on Other People's Blogs

This is a fantastic way to network with other bloggers. Let them know you are out there, and that you have something to say. Many times people will click your link because of your comment. Other times, the sites owner will want to check out some information about the people who visit their site, and reciprocate that comment to your blog or website. It's extremely important, though, that you do NOT under any circumstances spam people. Post comments that are worthwhile, have some thought put into them, and genuinely add something to the post, and you will find your traffic start to skyrocket.

I hope this article helps all of you young web administrators or bloggers get some traffic to your blog.