30 Ways to Grab Targeted Traffic and Backlinks – Free!

Search Engine Traffic

What collection of free traffic resources would be complete without mention of the two most used and heavily relied on sources of targeted traffic:

1. Search engines
2. Directories

It never hurts to be listed in search engines. The quickest way into them is to place a link to your top level domain (TLD) on a high PR website. Generally, once you are in Google, Yahoo and Bing you will be found by all the others. Remember to

1. Submit your TLD to them manually, once only (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
   
2. Register your site (sites) with their webmaster control panels
3. Authenticate your website with them and submit your sitemap (or sitemaps) to them to ensure all your pages are indexed and regularly spidered
4. Ping them whenever you update your content

Many sites receive most of their traffic from search engines.  It is important to keep in mind that search engines follow links and compare their details and immediate context with the content at their targets. A large part of keyword and keyphrase targeting is down to the anchor text and title carried by the links that lead to a page. For example, a link leading into this particular page that has the anchor text “free site traffic” and the title “free traffic sources” will boost this page’s search engine keyword ranking for combinations of the words “free”, “site”, “traffic” and “sources” were it placed on a page that discusses website traffic than were it on a page that discusses food condiments (different kinds of sources (sauces)). In other words, links placed on related pages are better than those on unrelated pages. You should aim to get at least 20 keyword optimized inbound links for every article you write; 20 well targeted inbound links are better than 40 ill aimed links.

Have you noticed that I sometimes use proper nouns instead of the pronouns that could easily replace them?

I could have ended the above paragraph with the pronoun “ones” instead of the proper noun “links”. The reason I used the proper noun is that search engines do not interpret pronouns: they spider documents and look for keywords and phrases. When a surfer searches for a particular term or phrase the search engine returns sites that use those terms and phrases, it does not return a list of pronouns. So, use proper nouns where possible and where they do not uglify content for human readers.

When you write content for your website, before you publish it, write an introduction to it and fill it with the keywords and phrases you intend to search engines and surfers to pick up on. Most surfers will read the first paragraph of a page to determine its suitability to their needs and interests. If the first paragraph fails to grab your surfer he or she will quickly move on to another website.

Directories can be good at sending traffic to a website but are generally only good at providing backlinks with targeted keyword anchors within good context. Most surfers use search engines.

Directories are used mainly by surfers who cannot find what they are looking for via search engines or by surfers with very specific needs. Most surfers who want a specific niche pornography will use a directory to satisfy their need (I manage adult sites too so I’m pretty certain of that) and those who need a good plumber with a long history will gravitate toward a local directory like their online Yellow Pages or Business Directory to find their plumber.

Some of the big directories with solid reputations like Dmoz, Yahoo and Gimpsy are worth getting into. Dmoz is free and takes ages to get listed in (I’ve been trying to get JournalXtra listed in it for nearly two years without success) whereas Yahoo’s directory costs $299 (a non refundable fee that does not guarantee submission into the directory) and takes up to 7 days to get listed in (too expensive for me to even consider it), and Gimpsy is inexpensive and quick to place registrants and sometimes offers free submissions.

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