Surprisingly a number of free sources can bring significant levels of traffic in their own right.

Using lots of free advertising helps to ensure that your website or blog has significant market coverage. This is important to act as a backstop for the times when search engines decide that your site is not for them.

The purpose of this post is to provide a range of free advertising options for you to consider. It will also reference some excellent free reports which cover the topics in some depth.

Where and how not to advertise

• FFA sites
• Porn, Hate or Warez sites
• Sites set-up specifically for link building
• Sites setup specifically for building page rank or SEO.
• Automated Traffic exchanges.

Stick with the tried and true “Good Neighbourhoods”. Ensure that links to your site are from pages related to its topic. Ensure that the anchor text contains the keywords you are trying to target.

“Natural linking” is what search engines like. They expect authority sites to build links slowly (no more than 10 per day is a good rule). Any use of “instant back links” is likely to result in the site in question being removed from search engine listings at least in the short term.

Search engines also expect that there would be a reasonable variance of anchor text. For example if you where targeting “dog collars”, you would have a range of links on the topic i.e. blue dog collars, green dog colors etc.

The best links to get are one way, from a page with a small number of outgoing links and a high page rank. However almost every link has some value & it should be taken unless it will disadvantage your site.

Where it consider advertising

• Free Classified Listings – Craigs list, Freeadvertising form, Fijiji, adland Pro and USFreeads are good examples. You can find a more detailed listing here

• Web Directories – There are a huge number of online directories accepting free submissions. An example is Web Directory1. Generally they require a reciprocal link to get a free listing. These are easy to get and will give good short term gain. However the gain tends to drop off with time as your listing is pushed down by other new submissions. There is an extensive list of free directories at vilesilencer, directoy listing

• RSS Directories – If you site doesn’t have an RSS feed get one. Then submit it to all the RSS directories you can find. These will serve your new material to a huge number of people. there is a list of blog and RSS directories here

• Blog Comments – Placing links on blog comments can give good results. Just be aware that most blogs have “no-follow” turned on their comments. This means that your link will get no “link-juice” but may still be of value from a traffic perspective. A good free tool to use to quickly find blog pages relevant to your subject is CommentHut. There is a paid version which works very well. The free version is still worth the effort download. It will save you a lot of time. A quick way to check for no-follow on links is to download the SEO for Firefox plugin.

• Article Submission – Write a short 500 word article, include the resource box at the bottom with links back to your site. Then submit the article to a good range of article directories. For best results submit a different version of the same article to each directory to avoid duplicate content. You will be rewarded in a couple of ways. Firstly with a bit of short term Page Rank from the directory. Secondly with traffic from the article directory, especially if the article is on a popular topic. Finally there are downstream effects as webmasters download your article and put it on their site. You never know where your article may end up. There is an excellent list of article directories here.

• Social Bookmarking Sites – These sites highlight web content which has been selected and voted popular by its members. A number of them allow you to publish your RSS feed. If your post is viewed as being popular then a significant amount of traffic can be generated to it. A first rate guide to social bookmarking is here

• Traffic Exchanges – These sites will send visitors to your site when you have visited other sites of other members. Generally the traffic doesn’t convert well, but it is instant and a good way to start your site promotion off. A good place to find the highest converting traffic exchanges is here. One traffic exchange with a slightly different model is TrafficSwarm. With this traffic exchange you get to choose the sites you visit by selecting an advertisement placed by the site owner. This does give better targeted traffic than the standard traffic exchange.

• Advertising Bars – There are advertising options which involve you installing an advertising bar on you browser. As you surf, advertising is displayed at the top of your screen. For each ad you see you are allocated points which in turn are able to be exchanged for advertising of your own. Check out Agloco .

• Yahoo & Google Answers and Mylot – These sites can be excellent advertising opportunities. Develop a solid reputation by answering questions fully and with some depth. Where appropriate add links to your site in the resource section. Where you see a pattern of questions in your niche, put up a post about that topic. You can then link to it for later answers. Sometimes the questions and answers achieve good rankings in search engines. Always include links to your sites in your user profile. As you build more authority, other readers will check out the profile and your site.

• Forum Posting – Three good advertising opportunities. Firstly you can generate traffic from the forum by including a link to your site at the bottom of every post. You do this by including it in your forum signature. Secondly some forums are well optimised for search engines and threads are often listed with good rankings. Always include your keywords when initiating threads in forums. Finally put a link to your web page in your forum user profile. As become well known, other forum users will check out your profile and your site. Here is a useful list of forums which have SEO friendly signature links

References:

Social Media Daily

Encyclopedia of Free Online Advertising

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With the standard Wordpress build the comments after each post have an Html tag called “nofollow”. This tells Google not to transfer page rank to the author of the comment.

The feature was originally implemented to stop comment spam. The downside is that the links don’t really “count” for a Google viewpoint so there is less of an incentive for people to stop by and comment.

With good spam tools in place the majority of comment spam is dealt to so there isn’t really a problem with removing the nofollow from comments and allowing the link to count once again.

With Wordpress this is very simple. Just install the DoFollow plugin and you are all set.

On our home business ideas blog we have implemented this and the results have been very encouraging.

Having installed the plugin its time to tell the world about it so other blog owners will visit and hopefully leave a comment. The easiest way to do so is to drop by Courtney Tuttle’s D-List and also Nicusor Cheles Personal Blog and let them know you have removed no-follow. They will add you to the list in very short order.

From there it just a matter of enjoying the regular an valuable comments left by your fellow bloggers. Your blog will be much more interesting to your visitors, will be updated much more regularly and you will have a new source of traffic for absolutely no cost.