Optical burst switching provides a feasible paradigm for the next IP over optical backbones. However its burst loss performance can be highly affected by burst contention. In this paper we discuss traffic engineering approaches for path selection with the objective tominimize contention using only topological information. The discussed strategies are based on balancing the traffic across the network in order to reduce congestion without incurring into link state protocol penalties. The routing strategies are evaluated by simulation on an optical burst switching model specifically developed for the purpose with OMNeT++. Results show that our strategies outperform the traditionally used shortest path routing to an extent that depends on the network connectivity.