How to Increase Traffic from Google on a Zero Budget
by Paul Easton

Search Engines over the years have struggled with providing relevant and good results for their users. At the same time, they have faced the "attack of the webmasters" from those determined
to use every trick or tool to get their web site at the top of the listings.

It can become a webmaster obsession (or maybe an addiction?) to "win the game" of search engine ranking.

Another option is to part with cash for a Search Marketing Company to do the work for you. This will not be instant, guaranteed or cheap as it takes time and resources.

This has forced the engines to change how they rank sites. The most important change to the rules is that of links or link popularity, meaning the amount of web sites pointing to your
site.

With Google this also means the quality of the sites linking to you.

There are several ways to get links to your site:

Exchange or reciprocal - This is when web site owners agree to place links on each other's site.

Affiliate Program -Having your own affiliate program is some times over looked as a form of linking, but can not only be a good form of linking but of real revenue production.

Paid Linking - this is when you can pay for links in directories. And,

Free Linking without return links. This is the area I want to focus on.

Some Internet marketing experts will tell it's not possible to get links to your site but there are ways that work. I will show you they are effective and more importantly, that Google loves
them.

Articles - Writing and submitting articles to other site owners is an effective way to get links to your site.

It's not as effective as it once was but publishers are still looking for quality, unbiased information. All you have to do is make sure you have a resource box at the end of each article, which points to your site.

Check out Jim Edwards book on help on how to write articles here:

http://www.turnwordsintotraffic.htm

It has a great template which you can use. Just fill in the blank templates to format your message.

If your spelling or grammar is not the best then a low cost editing option might fit you needs:

http://www.yourbestwork.com/

With articles, I highly recommend writing an article and leaving it at least a day, then looking over it again before allowing it to become public.

It can give you a chance to remove any obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. Once you have your article finished you need to find placed to submit. I have a list here:

http://www.digitalawol.com/esub.htm

But maybe you have a very specific market you want to reach?

Here is a step by step way of how to use Google to find good results on a specific market. Say you produce products or sell e-books on "weight""

1. Search in Google but think of the big picture. Instead of using "weight" search for "health" which brings around 181,000,000 results.

2. Scroll to the bottom of the results page and click the "search in results" link

3. Enter in the text box "submit article" with the quote marks, which will look for exact matches to the search term.

4. This brings up about 55,800 which should allow you to find at least 1000 sites that would accept your articles. Once you have covered those you could start again for different key words.

Also when you find a suitable site that accepts articles, create a folder within your bookmarks (add to you favorites list in Internet Explorer) and add it as a submit link, for ease of returning.

Other sites offer free links where you can place a link. A word of caution here, some sites use different programming languages in their design. They may list your site but Google and other
engines have trouble reading the resulting page and the link may not actually go to you but to a redirect file which then goes to your site.

The addresses of the links on the page may be something like this:

http://thesite.com/default.asp?m=gs&SiteID=39647 or

http://thesite.com/redirect?=1234

So they don't actually count as a link to your site. Look at other links on the site for a clue here. Check it out first before wasting your time placing a link.

On a side note here, it may still bring you some traffic if the site has large amounts of visitors.

Another way to get links is via discussion forums. Again, you have to check that you links will count towards your site. Also the forum must be aimed at your site so it would be best if it
has your key words in its name.

For example, I post regular help at Duncan Carvers Marketing-Strategy.org . When I do post I always use a signature like this on the end of each message:

------
Paul J Easton
Internet Marketing and Promotion from DigitalAwol.com
Custom IE (Internet Explorer) Toolbars from Createtoolbar.com
-----

And the most important words above are linked to my site - (that's every before the "from")

Due to the forum being very active, with new posts, the Google spider, which lists the pages in the search engine returns very often (they love new fresh content).

A small problem is the pages that are created have a Question Mark, like the examples above. All I need to do in this case is to submit the page I had posted to ensure that Google finds and
indexes it.

With in a couple of days Google listed my link back to my site. You can see this by going to Google and pasting:

"link:http://www.createtoolbar.com " without the quotes in the search box. and view the first link!

This is a great win-win. I helped someone else out and I got links to both my sites!

Hope this helps.


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Paul Easton is the owner of CreateToolbar.com,
Home of the Custom Toolbar and "Power Promotion Plus"
The free newsletter for real web promotion that works with
3 gifts for joining. Check it out here:
http://www.CreateToolbar.com/
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