What is a good way to get traffic
 

without spaming your site?

porn

Purchase the services of a PROFESSIONAL search engine marketing organzation. Not some guy in a garage. Not a web designer who think he knows how to make meta tags. A company that does search engine positioning as their main business.

I happen to know an excellent one. You can get into contracts with them of minimum 3 month duration. The price starts at something like $1500/month. PM me if you'd like more information.

And also having interesting/funny/useful content on your site that is original.

Content will be able to do more than anything else, IMO. Besides actually improving your site, if you get a lot of people to link to you, you'll appear higher on Google. So checkout webrings, affiliates, etc.

depends on the type of site you are running. if your site focuses toward a special interest try searching for forums where people are already talking about your subject matter. some forums have looser spam rules if you are posting a link in an applicable current topic.

NOTE: Google does not order it's search results based on meta tags. More and more search engines are starting to work this way.

I would save your money, submit your site yourself and play the waiting game. Once google gets a hold of your site the others follow pretty soon afterwards.

You'll find countless amounts of web sites that will for free submit your site to the search engines. It will take anything up to two months for your site to get spidered.

What type of website might we be wanting to let others see?

good orginal content.

damn, I was going to say by plugging yourself in your sig, but you'd be a fool to follow my advice anyway, at least on that subject...

if your site has relevant material on a subject that isnt "my personal web page" then chances are you will come up on your own on a search. All you need is content that is useful to people who share your interests.

Oh yeah, and you can always plug yourself in your sig at tfp...

:p

Is it a personal or professional site?
For either, putting your website in your profile or sig
and then talking a lot on various forums is a good start, but requires some work.
If it's a personal journal type of site, link to other journal sites. Their webmasters usually check out where their links come from. If they like your site, they might link it back.
And I agree with what everyone else said. Content is king. Also, make sure it's readable. No clashing colors or anything else that would make your reader go blind.

Blogging makes it easy. Just network with other blogs by posting comments on their sites gets that reader back to your site. If they like the information, they maybe they will put you on their blogroll. If you return the favor, it's a lot more likely.

After a while, Google will become your friend as well.

I have so many people find my site via Google. The latest trend is searching for the term "Skin cancelled." I have gotten a ton of hits from people wanting a place to bitch about the Fox show being cancelled: they are using a post in my blog to do that.

Have good content. and bring it to the ppl.
Then it'll just roll in traffic from "word of mouth"