I think it depends on the type of site you are trying to promote. Some strategies work better than others but in general, I would say the best way to get traffic to your site if you are short of funds is to create a lot of content. Create quality content for your site and also try to guest post and get your content out to authoritative sites in your niche.
I have to say having read all the great answers the OP's question - I wish I had come accross this forum in the first place, it might not have taken me so bloomin' long !
Susann
Summing up some of the above:
Good, unique content.
Write stuff that's on-topic, which will interest people and teach them something new.
Place Meta terms in every web page header.
Google allegedly ignores meta keywords but make sure your Title and meta Description are good and relevant.
Images with alternative text box filled in.
In common with many people, I often search Google for images because it lets me find exactly what I want a lot sooner. Having relevant images (your own - not stolen) with relevant "alt" descriptions, improves your site's chances of being found.
robots.txt file uploaded.
Never heard of it? Better start reading. Be careful what you exclude. In the early days I excluded my images because I didn't want them stolen. Now I "watermark" them with my company name.
Sensible use of colours.
An eBook about colour psychology reckons that red text drives people away - subconsciously it's perceived as a danger signal. Blue (turquoise to navy blue) is seen as "safe". Yellow/orange as warm and friendly. Stick to a theme with only two or three complementary colours and, for body text, use black, charcoal or a very dark colour on a white background. Coloured or dark backgrounds leave the reader with weird vision effects as he turns away from the screen. People won't rush back if you do that to them.
Sensible use of typeface.
The typeface/font that you choose should be legible. For body text use a sans-serif font such as Verdana, Helvetica or Arial. Large point size headings can be serif or sans serif but don't make it too fancy and stick to a theme. It's better to use only two fonts throughout your pages if possible. You might use a third for "box comments" but it's better simply to use one of the two with italic or bold emphasis.
Logical navigation links.
People expect links to be blue, underlined and in a left-hand column. Variations on this theme are quite acceptable, provided that it's obviously a link. Don't use (for example) underlining for anything other than a link. People can become quite frustrated when clicking on a "link" does nothing.
Your navigation menu doesn't have to be on the left nor your category tabs at the top - but that's where people tend to look first. Avoid having more than one navigation menu (e.g. a left and a right column) because that confuses people.
Don't fill your page with a bunch of flashing graphics - especially if they are not something to be clicked on. Banner adverts tend to be irritating and the average person will mentally "tune out" anything moving. Some will install software to blank out moving adverts.
Do make careful use of embedded videos to attract customers and encourage them to tell their friends.
If it's an Adsense site, get the adverts in place before notifying Google. I can't prove that it matters but I think it might.
Add a "Tell a Friend" button to each page. Add the usual Facebook "Like" and Twitter buttons, etc.
Finally, when your site is as ready as it can be, create a sitemap.xml file, upload it to the server, then notify the search engines. I use software called "Google Sitemap Automator" (MacOSX) from "Rage" to do all of this in minutes. It can be compiled by hand but that's tedious and there are plenty of tools out there - many of them free.
My experience of this method is that my main key words/phrases have been searchable in "Google" within just 2 - 3 days of notifying Google of the sitemap.xml file. It used to take me months!
And don't expect overnight success. You need a lot of hardwork and devote your time to get succeed.
This. I bang on about this a lot (probably to the point of boring people). The vast majority you need for your plan can also be found on this forum or links from this forum.As someone who started trying to get their website onto page one with no money to spend I think I can speak from experience. What you need is a plan, It is very easy to do little bits here and there and get distracted but you need to do is write down an SEO plan. If you want to get onto page one for 6 keywords then you need a plan
Check out the linked thread at the bottom, the methodology is simple and can be applied purely to SEO. Note from reading the experts the term SEO is quickly moving away from how it was perceived (high page rank, 1st page etc) an now has a very strong focus on traffic, the right traffic and how this traffic engages with your site.
A few tips if you follow the methodology below:
1) If your goal is rank first in Google (although very good) you have started all wrong....this is just an Output.....think about it.
2) If you think your too smart or don't have the time to use a planning exercise your wrong (trust me)
3) Although the linked thread seems to be aimed at beginners...its not.
http://experienced-people.net/forums...Online-Venture
Currently pondering on writing a detailed article on SEO planning and measuring.....most of the stuff I've found is pretty average and not comprehensive. Something with user friendly performance indicators and simple visual displays of what is and isn't working so well and where efforts would be best concentrated. Hmm then again I might bore the shit out of people.
Since we are doing "my three", my suggestions are:
1) Quality - Focus on creating value
2) Constancy - Keep working on it even though it seems fruitless at first
3) Volume - Keep building your content. The more (quality) content, the better
You can't make time go faster, so no need to focus on that IMO.
Looking at it from a different angle...
For your $money$ sites... Do not:
1. Use spun content
2. Use your main keyword for inbound anchor text
3. Have a links page unless it's a genuine reference page
4. Spam the easy social sites
5. Spam doc storing websites
6. Use blog networks for links
7. Forget to age your sock puppets before injecting links
8. Forget to link out to authority sites.
9. Interlink your feeder sites
10. Use tons of guest posters
11. Spam the meta keywords tag
12. Use the same keywords for file name, <TITLE>, H1
13. Think Google's Keyword volume tool is accurate. If you want REAL numbers - run Adwords and measure.
14. Use Fiverr to build back links. If you bought it, so have 10,000 others
15. Use Indian/Phil writers to build all your content
16. Spam co-occurring phrases
17. Put Adsense on your e-commerce site
18. Use the same press release on multiple free press release websites
19. Think all SERPs are using the same algo
20. Forget that Google can turn a dial and blow up your white-hat site
21. Rely solely on Google for your traffic. See #20.
22. Believe most things your read on SEO forums/blogs
23. Believe most things Google claims they can detect
24. Host your feeder sites with the same host as your money site
25. Forget Google is a domain registrar
26. Use directory submissions
27. Mistake long-tail for SEO
28. Fear buying links - just be smart
29. Forget that Page Rank can be faked
30. Ignore email as way to simply ask people to link to your *quality* content
31. Forget to use honeypots to block bad bots from checking you out
32. Use link dropping tools
33. Ignore the power of quality Press Releases
34. Exponentially grow your site using factorial programming for content
35. Be the first to use new webmaster tools from Google
36. Forget to spell check your content
37. Use Creative Commons images when you can take your own.
38. Follow the conventional wisdom without TESTING it yourself
39. Test on your money site
40. Forget Screaming Frog
41. Get lazy with on-page SEO
42. Have a slow loading website
43. Join a link ring
44. Forget to synonyms instead of repeating your keyword
45. Repeat your keyword 1000 times per page
46. Always use hyphens between keywords. Work to be where the future meets now.
47. Forget to ask for the sale
48. Think your content is better than mine.
49. Ignore user metrics. Google measures interaction.
50. Forget, most Google penalties are temporary...
For your non-money, feeder sites - you can pretty much reverse everything above.
Clinton (December 20th, 2012)
Are we doing 3 point advice? I'm completely off focus but I don't talk tripe ...Originally Posted by Matteo
OY! You need pics on the page. The spiders trained to look at pics come around only once every year. Put pics of daisies on there, they read the ALT text - so you can convince them they are looking at the innards of a nuclear power station. you conten kan be orrid if it no duplikat, foto mak it rite gogl fo luk att. nuff said.
Whatever the punters are looking for, keep it in view. The landing page can be full of any old doodah. Keep a link to the thing you're selling above the fold.
Quality? That's in the eyes of the beholder. Give the users the theory and leave them to work it out, they don't buy doodly. Give them the dummies guide with pics and y can sell doggydoo at 30 times it's true value -and they won't go through with the project anyway.
The thread has creepeded. Not SEO. It wasn't me ...
this is no longer valid advice. the latest update which many people called an 'emd update' in fact penalizes on-page overoptimization. g has gotten progressively better at determining what a page is about, so keyword stuffing your meta tags is now a non-negligibly strong negative signal. keep in mind that keyword stuffing in this context is not what it used to mean 10 years ago, eg 'keyword1, keyword1misspelled,keyword1,keyword1variation...ad infinitum' - much gentler and perhaps semantically valid mentions of appropriate keywords are now correlated with negative serp movement, possibly because they now count towards overall page keyword density coupled with synonym detection. i would advise to leave them be. the description is another matter - it's actually what g uses as a snippet to show in the serps unless it can find a more relevant excerpt on the page, so by all means write one, but don't write one with seo in mind and concentrate instead on ctr. place yourself in the mind of the person searching for your target keywords and come up with a description that will entice him to click through; at the same time, make sure that it represents the content of the page somewhat accurately - a description that promises comprehensive info, discounts and coupons coupled with a page that delivers none of those is going to result in a very high bounce rate, which can cause issues both with panda and inline ranking algos.
you need to be careful with this, since consensus held up until very recently that using targeted keywords in alt tags was highly advisable. as an example, a page targeting 'auto mechanic schools' would have a picture with an alt tag of 'auto mechanic schools'. again, this is now in approximately the same boat as meta keywords. instead, you might want to use a picture of a mechanic fixing a car with an alt of 'fixing a car'.Images with alternative text box filled in.
In common with many people, I often search Google for images because it lets me find exactly what I want a lot sooner. Having relevant images (your own - not stolen) with relevant "alt" descriptions, improves your site's chances of being found.
this has no bearing on seo, with the exception of some edge cases where you'd like to exclude certain content from indexing because of duplicate content or thinness issues. it's also very easy to mess up, so don't bother with it - if and when you need to use it, you'll know you do. keep in mind that although it is a 'standard', malicious crawlers ignore it regularly, so the value of using it to exclude them is minimal.robots.txt file uploaded.
Never heard of it? Better start reading. Be careful what you exclude. In the early days I excluded my images because I didn't want them stolen. Now I "watermark" them with my company name.
-p
Clinton (December 20th, 2012)
some of the best off-page seo tactics today can be pursued with a budget of 0, but keep in mind that money and time are two ends of a tradeoff spectrum - if you're not prepared to spend money, be prepared to spend a lot of time.
a good tactic to start with is blog commenting. i'm not talking about automated blog comment spam on blogs not relevant to your niche either. find blogs in your niche, read posts and contribute thoughtfully. use the url you want to get backlinks for in the website/url field when submitting comments and use a real email address and a name, rather than a keyword, in the name field. besides getting a backlink, you will also establish rapport with influencers in your niche over time, perhaps leading to more linkbuilding opportunities, eg in the form of guest posts, in the future. it will also give you a very good idea of what folks in your niche talk about and make it easier to come up with ideas for your own content. unlike most so-called 'white hat' techniques, this is widely applicable and has a quantifiable roi sufficient to make it worthwhile. it isn't appropriate for spammy niches like ppc (porn, pills and casinos), fashion etc, but if you're asking this sort of question, you shouldn't be in those anyway (you have neither the expertise nor the resources to be successful in them).
remember all the comments you made? if they were constructive and interesting enough, perhaps you've struck up a conversation or two with the blog owners or at least built some level of rapport. you can now approach them with the offer to write a guest post. if your site has quality content and doesn't directly compete with theirs, you'll get some conversions on that offer. there's an art and a science both in soliciting guest posting opportunities and in writing effective guest posts that will be accepted and there are plenty of detailed guides to that available at the drop of the google.
provided you've created a decent site with good content based on solid keyword and niche research (including ensuring that you're not trying to rank for terms that are beyond you at this point or can't monetize) and put in a lot of hard work on the above two strategies, you should now be getting at least a trickle of long tail search traffic. monetize it according to your strategy (you should've had one in place from before you built the site) and use the money trickling in to allow you to exploit more advanced linkbuilding strategies, such as the classic 'match and exceed' - look where your competitors got their backlinks and try to get some of those, then get some more they don't yet have. doing this requires paid services like ahrefs and majestic (or backlink ace from ilyas), so you'll need to invest a bit of coin.
-p
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