Although paid advertising is the fastest way to generate traffic to your small business website, unless you are experienced in managing PPC campaigns it can be very costly. Your alternative is to fully take advantage of free or organic traffic to your website. If you are just starting out online, there will be plenty to learn and a good number of hours to be logged while building your on page and off page SEO strategies.

Here are 10 ways for you to take advantage of free traffic:

Keyword Research. In order to reach your target market, you must know what your market is looking for. To do this, you must find the right keywords. This is possibly the most important step to getting traffic to your site. If you do not fully understand the ins and outs of keyword research, make it a plan to learn. On-Page SEO. The best way to get ranked well in search engines is to invite the search engines to visit your site and to give them clear directions as to what keywords you want to rank for. This is called Search Engine Optimisation of SEO. On page SEO refers to everything within your page that you can do to communicate with the search engines. To get this right, you must learn just a few basics of HTML so you can create meta tags and heading tags for your web pages. Internal linking. This is another type of on-page SEO. Creating links from one page to another within your website will give the search engines an indication of what pages your site gives importance to. It also makes it easier for the search engine to fully crawl your entire site. Submit a Sitemap. Although most search engines will eventually find your website, it may take many months. You can speed up this process by maintaining a Sitemap and submitting it to the top search engines any time you update the content of your site. A Sitemap is like giving the search engines and written invitation to your party. Pinging and RSS feeds. Creating an RSS feed for your website will allow your visitors to subscribe to your website updates. You can then ping the sites to let other RSS distribution sites know that you have new content to send out to the RSS feed directories. This is a good way to gain repeat visitors to your website. Article Marketing. Submitting articles to the various article directories is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. By writing articles and including your website link in the author bio or resource box, you are inviting anyone who reads the article to come to your website. This can gain you a great deal of traffic. Press Releases. Announce to the world that you have a website and are open for business. Submitting a press release is good publicity. It is not always free to submit these, but there are some free sites out there. It might be worth while paying for a few of these as it is a one time fee, as a rule, and it can generate a good ROI. Social Media Marketing. This is likely one of the most used and abused forms of generating free traffic. Marketing on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg and LinkedIn can mean a great deal of success for your business, or it can be a waste of your time, depending on how you approach it. It is to your advantage to fully learn the ins and outs before tackling social marketing. Building back links or inbound links. This is probably one area where you can make the biggest impact, aside from keyword research, on your success with the search engines. Link popularity is a key factor in where the search engines will place your website in the search results. Therefore, it should be one of the largest parts of an effective small business marketing plan. Video Marketing. A huge number of people watch videos online every day. The numbers are staggering. YouTube, being a Google product, will appear on the first page of the search engine ahead of many other web pages just for the fact that it is video and it is Google. Therefore, it is a very good idea to create a few simple videos to feature there. They can generate a flood of traffic and can allow you to communicate more effectively with your potential customers.

So there you have 10 ways to drive free, organic traffic to your small business website. There are still many methods you can use to grab even more, but for today, I am just giving you the 10 most popular and most effective places to start.

Yes, there is a great deal of work to be done. If you can outsource some of the work to an experienced internet marketing service it will help lighten your workload, but if you have plenty of time on your hands it is possible to learn to do it all yourself. Make sure you set aside a large portion of your day to market your business to success.