In general there are two free sources of traffic online. These sources are broadly defined as Social traffic and Search Engine traffic. 99% of all newcomers online set up a blog or website and proceed to try and obtain social traffic. They do this simply because everyone else does it.

Social traffic consists of using social networks like Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit, Entrecard, Forums and hundreds of other services that allow you to sign up and promote your site on them. These services are the backbone of what is known as Web 2.0 and has evolved into a newer version centered around Facebook, MySpace and the current craze - Twitter.

The general idea is to get out there and make friends online using these networks, draw them in to your site, wow them with your content and wait for the links to come pouring in from your adoring fans. As the links increase your traffic increases as more and more people find your site and in turn tell more people through the use of more links and one day you will become famous just like Darren Rowse of Problogger or failing personal fame you may still develop a hugely popular site like Engadget or the Huffington Post.

There is a certain appeal to all this - becoming popular has many advantages aside from the most obvious monetary considerations. Many people blog because they have something to say and just want an outlet for their views. Others dream of being a writer and use the net to publish their stories. Get your work out there and get discovered. Musicians and filmmakers use the net in the same way. Whatever your reason for starting a blog or website there will come a day when you say to yourself, “what is the point if no one is reading or watching or listening to my creative output?”

It is at that point that you will begin your quest to find traffic and invariably you will turn to the social networks. You will discover quite quickly that you can get social traffic fairly easily using Stumbleupon or even easier using Entrecard. Twitter might be the easiest of all. You will join forums and work at becoming an “authority” in your niche. You will make friends. They will send links. All will be wonderful… for a while.

Six months to a year down the road two things will happen - it always happens and it happens whether you have achieved a large readership or not. You wake up one day and realize that you are working like a dog and there is little to no benefit from all that work. Driving social traffic is a constant grind. If you stop posting, twittering, digging, stumbling, dropping entrecards, leaving comments on other blogs or any of the other daily chores needed to keep your name out there the traffic dries up. Moreover your health deteriorates and your friends and family are neglected as you spend hours and hours sitting in front of your computer single mindedly developing your brand. Even if you have managed to develope a few thousand RSS subscribers - something most beginners think of as a successful blogger - you will still ask yourself “is all this work worth it?”

Why? Because at some point everyone wants to be compensated for all that work. You may say now that you are just doing it because you like to “write” or you just need an outlet to release your opinions and I believe you. The problem is that you will not be satisfied just writing or opinionating if no one is reading your output. You will get sucked into the social traffic cycle and find out that it is work. And when you work that hard you will eventually want a monetary reward for it - in one form or another. Having 10,000 readers coming and reading just wont cut it if a book deal doesn’t materialize. Or you can’t make money from advertisers. Or JV (joint venture) offers don’t show up. No matter what your reason for blogging at some point you are going to want a reward for it and the more work you put into it the more return on time invested will be expected.

And that is the problem - you wont get a return from social traffic. They don’t spend money - they don’t click ads and the advertisers are no longer supplying inventory to social sites as that fact has become known. Today.com claims 10 million page views a month. That is fairly significant traffic. So why don’t we see the big advertisers on this site? Where are the finance/credit/bank advertisements? The auto company ads? The big brand names? What we see are ads for dating sites. And Adsense.

The advertisers are not coming to this domain in spite of the traffic. Today.com has had to find a means to monetize this site using affiliate marketing platforms which they are currently rolling out. Adsense does not perform well as the sub-domains are not targeted for premium CPC (cost per click) and are smart priced. They get pennies per click from adsense and the CTR is dismal at best. Today.com is a successful domain based on traffic but like many others online they have found out that all traffic is not equal. The majority of this domains traffic comes from social networks and social traffic does not convert well - meaning they can’t make much profit from it.

If you are reading this then chances are you have a site yourself and you spend a fair amount of time reading blogs and surfing the net. You are social traffic. When was the last time you bought something on a friends site? Or clicked on an Ad? You don’t do it often if at all and neither do all the other social bloggers and social network users. You are here to read. You are online looking for information and not looking to buy something.

Search engine traffic is quite different. Most people use the search engines - Google by far - when they need to find something. You don’t go to Today.com when you want tickets to a Broadway musical or are looking for a hotel in New York. You use Google. You have a purpose in mind and that usually entails buying something or at the least you need specific information about a specific thing. Search traffic is targeted and whether you are trying to make money online or just want readers, search traffic is the traffic you want because it consists of people looking specifically for what you are offering.

If you have a humor blog for no other reason than just to entertain then why not target people looking for humor blogs? The easiest way to do that is to rank number 1 in Google for the term “humor blog”. On average 2400 people a month will find your site. If you rank for more related keywords like “humorous photos”, “Humor writer”, “humor”, “funny pics”, “funny stories” etc then you will eventually have thousands of daily visitors to your site. And this is the best part - you can post when you want or not at all and the same traffic will show up every day. Moreover you will never have to spend 1 minute commenting on other blogs or stumbling or dropping entrecards or doing any of the other chores involved in social marketing. And the icing on the cake - your search traffic will click your ads. They will read your humorous post and because they found you while searching for humor they are likely going to click on those ads that point them to other humorous sites. They don’t care if they make you money or not - they are not bloggers. They are civilians looking for something and will click anything that leads them to their goal.

The process for obtaining search traffic is actually very simple but it does take work and most of all patience. It can also be done in conjunction with social traffic. The problem is 99% of bloggers only chase social traffic and completely shut the door on search traffic right from the get go. This doesn’t have to be and I will show you how to optimize for the search engines using some basic SEO techniques that will pay off hugely by the time you wane on social traffic. You can use social networks for immediate traffic while building your site for long term search traffic. If you don’t achieve search traffic then you will eventually burn out and all the social traffic in the world will not change that fact.

SEO Basics that must be used in order to drive search traffic to your blog are as follows;

You must use your keyword in your URL.

You must use your keyword in your Blog Title.

You must use your keywords in your Post Titles.

You must use your keywords and related terms in your post content.

You will get the best search results by only posting one post per page unless all your posts are related to the same keywords.

If using Adsense then always stick to one post per page.

If using photos then your keywords should be used in the alt tags.

You must use html for the bulk of your pages content. (plain old text)

These simple little steps are all you need to do to optimize your site for the search engines. You will get indexed for your keywords and ranked well. How high you get ranked depends on the competition. If there is little competition you could achieve top ranking doing little else. (Many of you experience some Google traffic for long tail keywords. This is because you used a term in your content that has little competition and Google found your site when someone searched for that term - unfortunately these terms don’t often provide much traffic) If there is a lot of competition then you will need backlinks pointing to your site using your keyword in the anchored text of the link pointing to you. That is all that is required to dominate any keyword online. Simple yes. In practice the hard part will be obtaining all the anchored backlinks needed to dominate a competitive keyword but following my on-site advice will make this task much easier - especially if you use social networks.

Now let me demonstrate what I am talking about.

I mentioned “humor” a few paragraphs ago as a lead in for my example site. But first a pre-amble to fill you in.

It seems I ruffled a few feathers in a post on my main site a few weeks ago. I mentioned that the bloggers on Today.com were beginners and the reason was to point out that most of the bloggers on here are following a failed strategy. They are almost without exception chasing social traffic and will eventually quit blogging for all the reasons I mentioned above. They will work their butts off making a few dollars a day and burn out. Most will not even do the social chasing and will quit long before they make a few dollars a day. This isn’t any different here or with beginners who start a self hosted blog or use free domains like Blogger that can be fully monetized. The fact is most of the people blogging today will not be blogging in six months. They give it a go, fail to attract readers, fail to attract money or both and quit. I have seen this cycle for years and anyone that has lasted as long as a year knows this is true. We see it time and again. Very few people actually do the work - the majority of my readers have been reading my blogs for a year or two and still haven’t built a site. It is what it is.

I highlighted one blogger in particular in my post - not to bash her - but because she is one of the few on Today that has the work ethic to succeed. She has a “humorous Photo ” blog and drives the most traffic to her site of all the Today bloggers. She does it using social traffic and works her tail off to do it. She is the type of person who could succeed online with a little SEO knowledge. It is unfortunate that her reaction was quite negative.

Note: The screenshot of Melissa’s post on the forum has been removed as it was inappropriate of me to show it - the forum is private and hence the comments made are as well. - Griz

Tact is not my strong suit and those who know me have seen this kind of reaction before. The thing is you also know I am going to show Melissa how she can improve her traffic stats whether she wants to listen or not. Her site is the perfect example of what not to do in regards to search traffic and by illustrating the mistakes it will become clear to both her and others how some simple tweaks could make a huge difference in her long term success. If it’s any consolation to Melissa she should know I only “pick on” bloggers who have the talent to succeed - there is no point in highlighting those that don’t.

This post is long enough so I will demonstrate on-site SEO next post and illustrate exactly why you should follow my advice regarding keywords using both Melissa’s site and mine. The results will not leave you in doubt about how effective it is at building links and traffic

Things are not like they used to be. The writing is on the wall for most all of the paper newspapers; it is just a matter of time before they all disappear just like nearly all of the pay telephones did. The modern consumer of today can kick back in the comfort of his or her own home and search free classifieds in every major newspaper in the world on the computer.

Whether you are trying to sell something or buy something, free classified ads are here to stay. By listing some of the more popular items listed in classifieds, the reader will get some good ideas about how to create a unique ad.

Classified Listing - Automobiles

The automobile classifieds, and new car advertising provide newspapers with their largest source of revenue by far. If you are using online newspapers to look for an automobile, you will usually be able to look free of charge but expect to be exposed to some online advertising. By being able to access all the newspapers around the country for free, you are sure to end up with a very good deal.

Classified Listing – Death Notices

As people get older, one of the first things they look at in the morning newspaper is the paid death notices in the newspaper. Many people have moved far away from where they grew up, so they especially enjoy being able to jump on the internet in the morning with their cup of coffee, and see who has died in their old home town. If they discover that a good friend or loved one has passed away, they then can further use the internet to deliver messages of grief and/or flowers to the funeral.

Classified Listing – Weddings and Anniversaries

The second most popular reason people read out-of-town newspapers is to see who is getting married in their old home town that they know, and who is having an anniversary. Once a familiar name is spotted, then the internet can again be used to send gifts or flowers.

Classified Listing – Residential and Commercial Real Estate

The internet completely changed the way people shop for either residential or commercial real estate. In the old days you would ride around the city with your real estate agent going from place to place. Today, you can view excellent pictures of all prospective sites from the comfort of your own home. Not only does this new way of looking save you gas, but you are able to narrow the selection done to just a few possibilities, thus saving you even more time.

Classified Listing – Jobs

Remember when you would show up at a company, with resume in hand, looking for a job? Not any more. Almost all jobs are applied for online initially. Further down the line, a favored candidate will be asked to actually come to the company for a face-to-face interview.

In this article I am going to tell you everything you need to know on how to get backlinks because backlinks are a crucial way of building your site’s traffic up. Many novices think getting backlinks is all about direct traffic as a result from someone clicking on the actual link. However, that is the wrong way to look at it. When you get many backlinks from reputable sites, it will greatly benefit your ranking in the search engine, so you get most of your traffic from search engines.

In fact, if your website has high ranking in the search engines, people will probably find your website a lot more through a search engine, than through clicking your link on a high trafficked website. However, you must first have high ranking in the search engine and part of getting that, is building many backlinks.

Building backlinks is a necessary part of high rankings in a search engine. Without dozens(or even hundreds) of quality backlinks, you will never get high rankings on competitive keywords you really want.

Nofollow and search engines:

Not all backlinks are equal. If the links use the nofollow tag or redirects, like a lot of sites do, they are worthless in the eyes of Google for passing on pagerank. The nofollow tag will be inside the a href tag. A redirect will be in the form of a dynamic url.

The reason why sites use nofollow or redirects is because in Google you give away a certain amount of pagerank through your outlinks on the page. Webmasters want to keep the pagerank flowing to their internal links, to keep those internal pages’ pagerank on their site high. They also don’t want to give their competitors an edge in the search engines by passing on “credit” to them too. So they nofollow everyone else. Most don’t realize that many forums and blog software automatically puts a nofollow in your signature and comment links.

Where to get hundreds of FREE backlinks?

1) Commenting on blogs that are part of the no “nofollow” blogging movement

2) Forum signatures that don’t have nofollows

3) Blogroll exchanges

4) Creating a network of your own websites and cross-linking

5) Submitting to SEO friendly directories

Anchor Text:

The text you use on the clickable link is Anchor text. Search engines use this as a way to rank your site for keywords. A few years ago thousands of people “Google bombed” George Bush’s biography page to the word “miserable failure” through the use of miserable failure as the anchor text. It is advised that when appropriate, mix up the variety of words in your anchor text once in a while. The reason for this is because Google knows that when 3rd parties reference your website, they won’t always use the same anchor text. If you always use the same anchor text Google, may calculate you as trying to artificially manipulating your backlinks.

If your anchor text is your website’s name, it may not be ideal for anchor text. For example, Dollars blog as anchor text isn’t that exciting to the search engines. Not many people search those words. A better choice of anchor text occasionally on my backlinks would be “blogging” or “making money online” or hundreds of other choices that are more popular phrases in the search engines. One problem with directories or link exchanges, you usually have to use your website’s name instead of anchor text.

Google and Pagerank & Link Juice:

As a general rule of thumb, the higher the Google pagerank the more valuable the backlink it will be. Google is the only search engine that weighs in Pagerank, but Google is the most popular search engine on the net, with 90% using it. As a result, it’s worthwhile to use it as a measure of backlink quality. One thing to remember, is if a site has high PR, but a lot of outgoing links on the page, less PR will be passed on per backlink, than if it had only a few outgoing links. This is often coined “link juice”.

One way vs reciprocal links:

One way links, instead of recipricol link exchanges is better seen by Google. I still think link exchanges are a great way to build backlinks and boost your rankings in the beginning, provided the backlinks are from older respected sites. If they are just from other junk or newer sites, then forget wasting your time and try othe ways to backlink build instead.

Link Velocity

You can even start to beat out higher PR sites in the search engines, if you have more backlinks and are more consistent building new ones long term. This is because Google sees a consistent supply of new raw backlinks called “Link velocity”, as a sign of a worthwhile site.

Backlink Relevancy:

Non-relevant website backlinks to your website are not as beneficial as relevant websites. But most important, is just getting the backlinks. Just get as many backlinks as you can, relevant or not. You probably hear a lot of supposed SEO experts saying that you should focus backlinks exclusively on related sites. In a perfect world that would be great, but many relevant sites may be hard to get because of limited websites or because they may be unwilling to do exchanges. It is often easier just to get a ton from unrelated sites and forget about relevancy.

A site getting links from dozens of unrelated sites and linkfarms, will outwin everytime a site getting much fewer and more relevant sites. I used to be concerned about relevancy, but from my own experience, relevancy is not as important as people think. A lot of non-relevant backlinks is always better than very few relevant backlinks. This is just a myth spread by people who are regurgitating it from what they heard someone else say.

Other Tips

Making comments on blogs who don’t follow the “nofollow” movement, is probably the most efficient way to build up a ton of good backlinks. Many of these bloggers also have high PR too. Do a search to find out what bloggers are following the do follow movement.

When signing up to a forum for the purpose of getting backlinks, make sure they don’t put a nofollow tags in signature links. Some forums automatically do this inside signature links, which would make posting there a waste of time. Forums aren’t very high quality backlinks because of the lack of subject focus and the high amounts of internal and outgoing links. However, it’s just another piece in your arsenal to easily get nice anchor text backlinks. Most forums aren’t indexed very well, so you may have to post a few times before even one of the links is picked up.

Creating a network of your own websites and cross-linking is an excellent way to get get backlinks. Make sure they do not share the same C blocks on the I.P address. Google will take notice of what you are doing if you do. Not only will you get direct traffic from each of your sites crosslinking to each other, but you can put those links in high visible spots making them usually more effective then link exchanges with other people.

Directory links can be low or high quality depending on the pagerank and structure of the directory. If you can get a one way link, that would be better than a recipricol exchange in the eyes of the search engines. Some directories use redirects or dynamic URL’s so you won’t get any credit. Don’t even bother submitting to those directories, even if it’s free. Directories are basically worthless if they won’t pass you any pagerank. You will not get any direct traffic benefit from most directories, with the exception of maybe Yahoo and Dmoz.

Getting a backlink from a .gov or .edu site in the past has been seen as more important than other TLDs. More recently, people have said there is no difference between domain TLDs. I tend to agree with that because like reciprocal linking, Google has caught onto people trying to game the search engines by purposely seeking .edu backlinks. To make matters worse, many spammers are using .edu sites. You probably in the long run would get more benefit worrying instead about getting a ton of new backlinks than a lot of time trying to get a few .edu. links.

Backlink abuse:

Google in particular, will factor in a lot about the quality of your backlinks. Rapid increases of backlinks, especially on newer sites, could actually work against your rankings in Google. Slow and steady ong term is the best. The older your site is, the less you have to worry, but you should never make it too unrealistic or else your site MIGHT drop out of the SERPs for a few weeks.

Paying for text link ads:

While building links one by one through the above methods can take you pretty far, buying links is the easiest and may be the only way to get you near the top. There are many webmasters out there that have such old established sites and/or have been buying links for so long, that you have no choice, but to do it yourself too. If you want to reach the top, you have to follow suit and do what they do. I recommend either Text-Link-Ads.com or TNX to build natural looking links into other people’s websites. These links won’t appear to Google as paid links because they don’t come with any easy identifiable logo that a search engine can identify. Just make sure you don’t buy too many links at once and do not always use the same anchor text, so you can bypass some of the “filters” of Google.