Paying for traffic is great when you have no time or a brand new site, but wouldn’t it be nice to find your customers without paying for them? Outside of small ads on forums, I haven’t paid for any advertising in 18 months. I simply don’t need to. I have mastered the free methods so completely that I personally don’t need to pay for traffic at all.
Obviously, the free methods are the main focus in this course.
Understand that you don’t necessarily have to do all of the work with many of these methods. Outsourcing tedious work is the first step to having a serious and profitable business.
Let’s say you love to write articles, but hate to do any graphics or web work. Take a look at the communities that you’re a part of right now and find someone that likes to do those things. Trade work with them and you’ve now found someone that you can outsource the things you hate to do. You also have a new relationship that can help you expand your business even further.
Search Engine Optimization
Free rankings in search engines show a much higher likelihood of click-throughs than PPC ads. Obtaining those rankings isn’t always easy though. Search engine optimization is a changing craft at all times. What works today may not work tomorrow. This is why you should focus on ethical methods of proving to search engines that you are a site worth visiting. Trying to cheat the system will do nothing but make your job more difficult the next time the engines decide to update their systems.
Use multiple sites on different hosting plans from different companies (feel free to trade with friends) to set up a silo structure for your sites. What this does is allow you to raise your own search engine rankings by linking to your sites from each other.
By having multiple sites linking back and forth, you are funneling traffic from one of your sites to the next. Focus on using links that will make you money if they point to sites you don’t own!
On-Page SEO – html coding, Meta tags (title, keywords, description), header tags, inner-site linking structure, and site content. Formatting these tags right can make or break your rankings. The focus on onpage factors of SEO has changed due to spam and cheaters.
Use this example for your Meta Tags:
<title>Your Company Keyword 1 | Keyword Phrase 2</title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Add 2 to 3 sentences here and be sure to use your main keywords and keyword phrases."> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Keep this keyword tag simple, only use 10 to 20 keywords and keyword phrases separated by commas">
You MUST utilize these tags: Alt tags for images using keywords, h1 to h6 (header) tags for important keywords, and tags for keywords on every page.
Add a robots.txt file even if you don’t need one, the search engines look for it.
?Add at least one content page of between 300 and 600 words based around your main keywords every week. Before you know it you’ll have a huge site with a ton of great information, which the search engines love!
Use text links at the bottom of every page and insert at least one text link inside the content of every page utilizing your targeted keywords.
?Keep your site clean and simple whenever possible. If your site is hard to navigate, you won’t get business whether you get zero traffic or thousands of visitors.
?Google has developed their methods to a point of recognizing when someone is writing for people. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this means is that they look for related terms in your content. If you are writing about office chairs, they expect to see terms like desk, computer, and bookshelf. Simply write for people and don’t worry too much about this.
Add a sitemap and submit it to Google (sitemap.xml) and Yahoo. The big 3 search engines have agreed to use the sitemap.xml format. For more info on this go to sitemaps.org.
Off-Page SEO – This is completely link development. There are many ways of obtaining links for SEO and most of them are discussed here. Every link that points to your website is considered a vote by the engines. Does this mean you need to generate millions of inbound links? Not really. Focus on quality over quantity and your SEO picture will come together.
Search engines put a high weight on the words you use to link to your sites. This is called anchor text. Here is how a html link is formatted:
<a href="url.com">Anchor Text to be displayed</a>
You must use a multi-tiered approach in your link building. By using the methods contained here, you will have tons of links pointing to your sites in no time. Just be sure to use as many as you can.
Firefox Add-ons give you some amazing abilities when it comes to seeing what your competition is doing. This specific SEO plugin from Aaron Wall’s SEO Book site allows you to see which sites are using the “no-follow” attribute on outbound links. This allows you to save time when looking to build links to your website. You can find it here.
Universal Search
Google has made the wise decision to incorporate images, videos, news, maps, and products into their regular search results. Understand that Google can’t read images or video.
News Optimization
Getting into Google News is as simple as submitting a press release to the right press release directories. See the press release section for more information on this.
Maps Optimization
Check your address and make sure that it is listed as your business. If not, modify the address! If someone looks for your exact business name, this will normally be the first result.
Image Optimization – Images are actually searched quite a bit. Your affiliates will search for images they can use in promotions and you can definitely get visitors through image optimization.
To optimize images do these simple, but very specific things:
Name your images with your keywords

Over 83,000 results with the name “image001”. These people should be embarrassed!
Your “alt tag” should use your keywords. This tag was created for the blind so they can understand what they would be looking at if they could see. Don’t be spammy and keep it focused. Also, don’t name all of your images with the same keywords, change it up!
The words near your image should also be your main keywords. Nobody is doing proper image optimization and you can dominate the image results for nearly any keyword imaginable. Video Optimization – Videos are searched every day, all day long. Did you know that the average YouTube user spends over 43 minutes watching videos every day? Be sure to check out the video marketing section for detailed instructions on dominating video sites.
Your title should start with the term you want to rank for. Your description should include your keyword terms in different, logical, and readable sentences. Your tags need to include your keywords. Join terms with a dash if needed. Attract viewers to your video by putting it everywhere!
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