What is the best way to drive traffic to your site for free?

Answer

Google, right now. Look to Yahoo and MSN Search here shortly to grab more of the action.

Search Engine traffic is your best source of free traffic. In order to get that traffic, you need to be found by their spiders and have good optimized page content to rank well in the search results -- otherwise known as SERPS.

Ranking well is based largely on inbound links to your website. Establishing those links will take time -- and you should always be in pursuit of them. The more links you have, the more you get crawled and also your site popularity goes up.

Links can be exchanged (with similar relevant sites like your own) or they can be bartered or sometimes even bought pretty cheap. Do not go for banner ads, text links are more valuable in the search engine's eyes for the anchor text which should contain keywords that you want to be found for. This is known as "anchor text" and is 'the' number one ranking factor in search today.

Avoid linking schemes such as free-for-all, link farms, or any other type of plan to artificially inflate your inbound links. This is spam -- plain and simple, and you will get penalized for it if caught.

To learn more about search engine optimization and marketing, look to some sites that I highly recommend:

Search Engine Watch Search Engine Watch Forums WebProWorld Forums Band of Gonzos Forums

The articles at Search Engine Watch are highly regarded in the SEO industry on a variety of issues. The editor, Danny Sullivan, is probably the most experienced in the industry. The forums surrounding it and the others have some of the best advice that you can find on this subject and just reading will give you a better understanding on what all is involved.

Answer

Have links on as many sites that could even be remotely associated with whatever product you're marketing.

First answer by ID0000000000. Last edit by anonymous. Question popularity: 103 [recommend question]