While there are many traffic specialists clutching along their tools and tactics, they come with a hefty price. If your start-up budget is tight and you would rather not spend a dime in driving traffic to your site, then roll up your sleeves and start working.

The following ways would not be easy if you are a newcomer in internet business. But after a while you’ll get to master these things and get comfortable applying these in your subsequent sites:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t be terrified by this word. SEO is simply a technique that you implement on your site to rank higher in the search engines. As you will know, the search engine is the number one place where people would start if they want some information in the internet. Some of the SEO techniques you can implement right away to get amazing results are the following:

a) The title tag of each page of you site should contain your chosen keyword. You will notice the title tag appearing on the uppermost part of your browser. You’ll need a little HTML knowledge to do this.
b) Your chosen keyword should be on the first sentence of the paragraph of your page.
c) The image alt tags should contain your keyword.
d) The file names of each page of your site should also have your chosen keyword.

2. Submit articles to various article directories. By writing then submitting articles to the directories, you are guaranteed long term traffic. When your article gets posted in the directories, you get exposure. In the resource box provided by the submission site, you’ll get to write your website address. This becomes a link which points back to your website. There are hundreds of article directories out there waiting for your submission. While your article stays in the directories, they get picked up by other sites hungry for the article you have written. What happens if thousands of other marketers take your article from these submission sites and reuse it on their sites? You’ll get an enormous amount of links pointing back to your website. Provided that your article stays in the directories that you submit to and in the sites that picked them up, people can find it and the likelihood of getting traffic to your website is markedly increased. Some article sites where you can start your submission are ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, isnare.com, articlealley.com and articlebeach.com.

3. Build a blog then link it to your website. A blog is simply another form of website. The two popular tools for blogging are Wordpress and Blogger. The postings you make at Blogger are easily picked up by Google. Every time your blog is updated, the search engines are alerted. Once fresh content is in your blog, the search engines will notice it and come indexing. Putting your main keywords as part of your fresh content will help you rank higher in the search engines. Blogging adds pages to your site which search engines love. Blogging is free and very easy to do.

The first 3 ways above can be implemented free but this fourth way would cost you some dollars. But remember this last one is extremely important.

4) Register your own domain name with your keyword in it. For example, if you site is about car parts, the best domain name would be carparts.com. If your site is about baby care, then babycare.com is an excellent choice. Registration of domain names is a lot cheaper today than a couple of years ago. At vaultisdomains.com the annual fee is only $9.99. Studies have shown that search engines are more likely to put your site at the top if your domain name matches the search phrase. Also remember that non hyphenated domain names rank higher than those separated by hyphens. For example, mydomain.com is better than my-domain.com.

These four inexpensive ways of getting traffic to your site are extremely effective and would assure you of a long term success. Start doing these things and see your site in the first page of the search engines in a matter of weeks.

Organic SEO still refers to the processes and strategies that are undertaken to optimize a website so that it gets good relevance ratings based on the keywords that the site is responsive to. The only difference between Organic SEO and the SEO we now know is that Organic SEO is a manual process vs. the current automated processes of page submission and alteration that characterizes “modern” SEO. Organic SEO focuses on promoting websites on the Natural search engine results also known as organic results in contrast with sponsored links (Pay-Per-Click/PPC). For more details visit to www.huge-niche-keywords.com .Organic SEO, if you really think about is a “purist” approach to website optimization because nothing is a “black box”. As an expert in Organic SEO, you know optimization; you don’t just blindly trust it.

Organic SEO is based on a clear understanding of fundamental concepts, including:

• Search engines and how they work

Obviously, you cannot practice Organic SEO if you don’t even know how the first two letters of SEO (i.e., Search Engine) works. A search engine is a web site that provides the visitor a list of recommended websites to go to, based on a specific keyword or keywords. The rank of a website is statistically determined by what is termed as “key word density” or the ratio of keywords to the total number of words of content in a website. Inbound links and their relevance is another factor that determines your rankings. The gatherer of this statistical data is what is called a “spider” or “spider bot”, which is a program whose function is to count the number of times a keyword appears in a website through a process called “crawling”.

• Search Engine Optimization

You can’t have Organic SEO without the SEO part, which stands what Search Engine Optimization. SEO’s main goal is simple: bring as many visitors to your website as possible by exerting influence on the search engine to position your website as close to the top of the list as possible. As a result of having more visitors, it is hoped that your website will generate business for you. This result is every Organic SEO practitioner’s clear measure of success.

• Viral Marketing

This is an important concept to understand if you are serious about becoming a good Organic SEO expert. Viral Marketing is a strategy to exponentially increase the number of visitors to your website from a small base that you have developed from your initial Organic SEO strategy. An example of Viral Marketing is to offer visitors to your website an opportunity to generate income from their own website by simply putting in your website’s link on theirs so that when people visit their website, then there is a good chance that they will visit yours. This strategy is certainly a handy component of the arsenal of a practitioner of Organic SEO.

• Optimized Domain Names

One of the simplest concepts to understand, yet also one that is not as easy to implement. Getting a keyword-rich domain name is every Organic SEO consultant’s dream because it carries so much weight in the relevance scale. If you domain name is exactly what you are selling, you will be able to smoothly sail on without much of a problem in the rankings. The problem, of course, is that there is a very high likelihood that the “good” domain names already belong to someone, and this makes an Organic SEO specialist life more difficult.

• Keyword Research

This is the first step on the list of to-dos for an Organic SEO practitioner because it plays a major role in determining your optimization strategy. For more information logon to www.the20seotools.com .Since it takes months for any optimization strategy to take effect, an Organic SEO expert’s efforts will be wasted if he makes the mistake of optimizing a website based on keywords that are not as popular as he assumed.

Becoming an Organic SEO specialist is not an easy task at all because it requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals that those utilizing automated systems take for granted. There is a major advantage, however, of Organic SEO vs. the “lazy man’s” SEO: A clear understanding of the concepts allows you to analyze SEO situations more accurately and come up with strategies that are more appropriate and responsive to your website’s needs.

Learn the new rules of real estate marketing! Old rule: Your website is all about you.
New rule: Your website is all about the customer. Old rule: Online advertising will surpass offline advertising.
New rule: Integrated offline and online advertising wins every time. Old rule: Delivering leads is the only job for a website.
New rule: The best websites deliver leads and customer service. These are just some of the new rules of online marketing that you’ll find in this

Rating: (out of 26 reviews)

List Price: $ 29.95

Price: $ 9.99

• ISBN13: 9780471472230
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
  
  photo credit: RambergMediaImages

If the idea of starting a social media marketing campaign overwhelms you, the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results.  Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day.  In addition, learn how to integrate social media metrics with traditional media measurements and how to

Rating: (out of 37 reviews)

List Price: $ 29.99

Price: $ 12.12

More Internet Marketing Products

• Search Engine Optimization
• Google Adwords
• Bing Optimization
• SEO
• SEM

A very well-designed web site is useless if no one can find it on the web. If your company is going to succeed on the web, optimizing your site for search engine visibility is a must. Especially since it is the telephone book of the now, not the future. This book is written by the two most noted and accomplished experts in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) and provides you with proven guidelines, cutting-edge techniques, tips, and the how-to’s for planning and executing a comprehe

Rating: (out of 9 reviews)

List Price: $ 24.96

Price: $ 22.46

Believe it or not, your small business has an edge. No, you might not be as well-funded, well-connected or even as well-established as the big guys. But something convinced you to go out on your own. Something convinced you that you could compete. You are smaller, more agile, more adaptable than your larger competitors. And maybe more imaginative too. Don’t miss any opportunity to hone that edge. Or any tool that can help you do it.

Referrals

The best way to get new customers. It costs less and yet is probably more reliable than any other method imaginable as a tool to grow your business, especially in the beginning. So why do so few small businesses do it well? In this interview with John Jantch of Duct Tape Marketing we learn more about the technique that, more than anything else, will change the way you do business. The Rise To The Top

Teaching your business to market itself. “If we all know that referrals are the best, most cost-effective marketing strategy, then WHY OH WHY do we continue to leave referrals up to fate or some happy coincidence?” asks Ivana Taylor in the lead of her review of John Jantch’s new book The Referral Engine also discussed in the interview above. Small Business Trends

Startup

Think you can’t start a small business? Read this inspiring interview with Weldon Long and think again. After 20 years, as Long describes, “broke, homeless and drunk” including a 13 year stint in prison, he turned his life around to build an Inc.5000 company with more than $20,000,000 in sales. Entrepreneurship Interviews

From ex-felons to entrepreneurs. Business owner Todd Pemberton has a unique approach to rehabilitation. When ex-cons Pemberton has worked with get out of the clink, they often become small business owners of their own. He’s also hired some paroled ex-felons motivated by a very different kind of investment. Read his story. Inc.com

Social Media

What one tool should your small business consider using today? If asked, Becky McCray would answer social media, adding that, rather than being overwhelmed by the many possible channels out there, small business owners should focus on just one. And that one should be Facebook. Listen to the full podcast discussion. Bigg Success

Want to know the real power of social media to help small business? How about the story of how the 20 something Hampton, Iowa, entrepreneur of a shop known as Orange Possum who won a $5,000 small business grant just because supporters nominated her in an online contest and encouraged others to vote via Facebook. What could you do with social media to boost your small business? Need A Little Advice?

Marketing

Putting your eggs in one basket. In addition to e-mail and traditional marketing, there are many other solutions out there including guerrilla marketing and social media marketing. The success or failure of each will vary with the type of business you run and the market you are trying to reach. So be informed about your decisions. Prisma Graphic Blog

The secret to NoFollow marketing. With increased emphasis on preventing simple link building SEO strategies with use of NoFollow tags on YouTube and other social networks, don’t make the assumption these platforms are now not particularly helpful when planning your online marketing strategy. Business consultant Paul Rudo makes this recommendation when approaching at least one kind of NoFollow marketing. Small Business CEO

Policy

Progress in the movement to set limits on credit card interchange fees? On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill giving the Federal Reserve the authority to regulate interchange fees. But the bill must be reconciled with proposed legislation in the U.S. House before becoming law. Vantage Viewpoint

From Small Business Trends

photo credit: Tormod Sandtorv

• ISBN13: 9780321526281
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals.  Between these covers you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience. Each chapter will introduce you to best practices and fresh perspectives on how to accomplish these simple, yet indispensable goals:
Help more people find your site. Help users find content within your site. Encourage return visits. The path this book travels through the villages of Web standards, ac

Rating: (out of 28 reviews)

List Price: $ 44.99

Price: $ 12.99

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:
Tim Berners-Lee
Clay Shirky
Chris Dixon
David Weinberger
Nova Spivack
Jason Shellen
Lee Feigenbaum
John Hebeler
Alon Halevy
David Karger
Abraham Bernstein

In this post Mark Hayward shares some ‘must do’ tips for small business owners who are getting ready to launch a blog.

Are you getting ready to launch your baby? You know, your small business blog.

Blogging for small business is certainly not revolutionary anymore, and it has been well documented that it can improve your search engine rankings, increase your brand awareness, and ultimately bring you more customers.

However, after reading this CNN article, it occurred to me that many small business owners are still struggling with the basics. (Note: If you’re an expert or ProBlogger this post might be a little too introductory for your skill level. However, please feel free to add additional critical tasks in the comments.)

When it comes to blogging, sometimes getting your small business blog up and running can seem more of an actual pain than drafting the content itself. But, if you are at the pre-launch or just launched stage, doing things correctly now can save you from lost blog traffic, a decrease return on investment, and a world of other potential problems that might arise later.

1. Define your customer. Yes, before doing anything technical at all, make sure you know exactly who your ideal customer is:

• Where do your customers come from?
• What type of content should you create that helps them?
• Where do your customers hang out online?

2. Determine if you’re going to create a blog within your business website or on its own. This is a serious decision and you need to give quite a bit of thought to determining if you want to setup your small business blog as mysmallbusinesswebsite.com/blog or if you want to keep it separate with something like mysmallbusinessblog.com.

When I started my small business three years ago, I made the conscious decision to keep my small business blog separate from my business website. I did this primarily because I was going to eventually turn the blog into a second business where I could sell advertising space to other local businesses.

With respect to your small business, you need to ask yourself some key questions.

• What are the benefits to you if you create a small business blog that’s integrated into your website?
• Could you get a blog that’s separate from your website to rank quicker in search engines?
• Do you plan to launch a secondary business off of your blog?

3. Keyword research for domain name. If you are going to setup your small business blog separate from your business website then by all means you should do some keyword research.

As a simple example, if I owned a bike shop in Chicago I might check with Google Keywords for the generic term ‘bikes.’ Just to get an idea of what people are searching for.

And if I wanted to run a more targeted search that includes the additional keyword ‘Chicago’ I can run a phrase based query with ‘bikes Chicago.’

Obviously, the search volume is less, but you can get an idea of what words you should include in your domain name. Keep in mind, if you are going to be using a lot of video, or incorporating a video channel, you might also want to use a resource like the YouTube Keyword Tool.

Above all, remember that you want to secure a domain name:

• that is brandable and has easy recognition with respect to your small business
• has the potential to rank well in various search engines
• sets you apart from the competition and is as short in characters as possible

(Note: as an added bonus, your keyword research can also help you to come up with a list of blog post ideas.)

4. Choose a blogging platform and select a design or theme. Everyone has their favorite blogging platform. I myself am a fan of WordPress for both my small business website and my blog, but you might also want to look at some of the other options that are out there such as Blogger, Movable Type, and Joomla.

According to Matt Cutts (of Google), in his presentation ‘Straight from Google: What You Need to Know,’ WordPress has done a great majority of the SEO work for you (see video below), but have a look around at the other options and make a choice based on your preferences.

Once you’ve chosen a platform, the topics of design and SEO are way beyond the scope of this post, but for further reading see some terrific ProBlogger resources here, here, and here.

5. Register your social media accounts. If you haven’t done this already, before you have launched your small business blog is the time to get this task done. Places you might want to start are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• FLICKR
• Google (create your Google profile)

6. Measuring ROI, listening, and your blog’s feed. Many would be small business bloggers are extremely concerned about the time they will have to dedicate to producing content while still gaining a valuable return on their investment. After I launched my small business blog, one of the best ways I discovered to discern how my customers were finding me was to just ask them how they heard about my venture.

Free online tools like Google Analytics and Google Alerts provide you with additional knowledge that you can use to learn and track how your customers are finding you online.

Additionally, your small business blog’s RSS feed provides a convenient way for your customers to receive updates when you post new content. And if you offer an email feed option you can start the beginnings of a nice email list.

7. Draft at least ten posts in advance and have them loaded with preset publish dates. Whether you intend to post once a month, once a week, or once a day, having a little bit of a cushion built up before you launch can make your introduction to blogging much easier. As we all know, emergencies pop up all the time as a small business owner and having a stable of posts ready to go can ease the pressure a bit. If you’re struggling with what you’ll write about, here are 31 blog post ideas to help you.

8. Spend some time in forums. Online niche forums are like any real world social situation. You can’t just show up on the day you launch your small business blog with a huge announcement and expect to be taken seriously.

Building trust within forum communities is time consuming and is typically determined by how long you’ve been a member and the value you’ve provided. Spend at least a couple of weeks (or better a couple of months!) helping, engaging, and supporting fellow members.

9. Reach out to key influencers. All small business niches have industry leaders who are online and could potentially assist you with getting the word out regarding your blog. However, if you are going to seek the help of influencers, getting to know them has to be done well before launch day. I learned this lesson the hard way, so please learn from my mistakes.

10. Draft a web optimized press release. When you are ready to launch, you might want to draft a web optimized press release and let the world know your small business is now online. You can use a service like Pitch Engine to submit your release to and you might even get lucky enough to time your launch with some free publicity opportunities that you find through Help a Reporter Out. In order to help you with this final task, here is a great presentation by Brian Solis.

How to Write Social Media Press Releases – By Brian Solis

As a final thought, I always like to tell people that the first week of blogging is euphoric and the third month brings frustration, so remember to be consistent in your efforts. Now go launch your small business blog with a bang!

Want more ‘must do’ small business social media tasks from Mark Hayward? Then subscribe to his RSS or email feed and follow him on Twitter @mark_hayward.

image source: p_c_w

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

9 Critical Tasks Before Launching Your Small Business Blog

Much of the search engine optimization advice found online and at conferences centers around keywords and links. A lot of the spotlight on internet marketing has focused on content and social media. There’s no question that we’ve been a strong proponent of these tactics, sharing many, many posts on them.

Content and link based SEO relies on the search engine crawlers to find web pages and digital assets on their own. Search engines are far from perfect at this, so the opportunity to provide search engines with structured lists of content via feed, can provide some companies with a competitive advantage.

At SES New York I moderated a session on Pushing Feeds and XML with Brian Ussery, Amanda Watlington and Daron Babin. Much of what we share on SEO is focused on content and links so I thought I’d share some of the rich insights offered in this very useful session by asking the panel a few follow up questions:

How much of an advantage can supplying a XML feed offer a site for indexing and search visibility?

Brian: It’s really difficult to quantify in terms of a percentage but, I’d say the larger your site and more images you have the better it is to provide an XML Sitemap.

How important is it for a new site to supply (or make available) a XML sitemap for search engines?

Brian: Sitemaps are one of the best ways I can think of to let engines know about your new pages and images.

Amanda: A new site has no inbound links hence there is no way for a search engine to find the site. A Sitemap not only provide a point of departure for the crawling of a new site, by putting one together a site owner can include the most important pages. This is particularly useful if the site is quite large. The Sitemap can cue to spider to pages that in fact link much deeper into the site. This jump starts the indexing process.

Would you ever advise a company NOT to use sitemaps?

Amanda: There are very rare occasions where I would not use a Sitemap. Those instances are when the contents of the site are very problematic. When there are lots of duplicate content issues that are in the process of being resolved, it makes little sense to urge the search engines to grab a Sitemap that will only bring them to the site’s woes even faster. Once the issues are settled then the Sitemap becomes an important weapon in the SEO’s arsenal.

Brian: If you have pages that you don’t want indexed, it’s probably best not to include those URLs in your XML Sitemap. Other than those kinds of situations though, I’d say Sitemaps are the way to go. I would suggest however, not including XML meta data in Sitemaps unless it’s accurate, correct and up to date.

It was interesting to learn during our session, the variety of feed types that could be used from those associated with web pages to news to video and I recall one for NASA? Do you have any examples that have called for unusual solutions or use of feeds?

Amanda: Structured data such as the Sitemap is fascinating in that it provides so many opportunities to communicate data information in a machine-readable format.

There are two feed types that we did not discuss during the session. First, there are product feeds, such as those used by Google Base and other comparative shopping search engines. These allow merchants to draw product information quickly and efficiently from their databases and submit it to a shopping engine. Once formatted, a site owner can submit thousands of products with little or no intervention.

The second type of feed was just announced this past week. It is now possible to submit image information (to Google). This has been long awaited. I’ve not yet had a chance to use this, but I have been eagerly awaiting image Sitemaps.

Either way, it’s kind of interesting to see! You can find out more at NASA.

How important is the protocol Pubsubhubbub being promoted by Google? Does it replace the need for autodiscovery?

Brian: Great question Lee, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH or hubbub for short, in case you haven’t heard is an open protocol for turning atom or RSS feeds into streams. Because it requires real feed URLs, autodiscovery isn’t really necessary. So, I don’t see Pubsubhubbub as a replacement for autodiscovery per se, but rather as a more efficient method. Some folks I’m sure will continue to use autodiscovery for their feeds but I think PuSH provides additional advantages that will be favored by most.

Is there a threshold for how many pages/items should be included in a sitemap feed or how often data is updated to determine whether providing a sitemap is worth it?

Amanda: It is difficult to give an across the board threshold for when and how much to include. With retailers, we clearly must look at their seasonality and time the Sitemap submissions to be sure that any new products or category level pages have been spidered and indexed prior to the season’s start. How much to submit is really tied to how complete is the site’s current indexing.

I personally believe that it is possible to strategically manage the process making sure that key pages which direct to deeper pages are included. As I mentioned in the session, Sitemaps are not a blunt object, a club, to be used to batter one’s way into the index, rather they provide a method for strategically informing the search engines of what you want found. I love to fish, salt or fresh water, and I think of Sitemaps with a fishing metaphor. They are bait.

Whether you submit a Sitemap or not, it is important to have a Webmaster Tools account. The Google team that is responsible for developing this resource continues to make it a much richer and more informative. Today, I consider it a powerful resource for knowing just what the most powerful engine is seeing in a site.