Get free Web traffic

Search engine marketing falls into two categories: PR and advertising.

PR tries to influence free listings by affecting how Web crawlers find pages. Pages that are optimized for search get found more often. PR creates credible visibilty when pages appear near the top of free listings. Searchers click these "above the fold" listings because they seem more relevant and can be viewed without scrolling.

"You can consistently enjoy free traffic if you do search engine PR right," says Danny Sullivan. "But if you want a guarantee that you'll be listed in Google or Yahoo, buy an ad."

To achieve high rankings in the free listings, you must:

1. Know your message. Identify the top 10 words or phrases you want to be found on your Web site using tools such as WordTracker or Yahoo! Search Marketing's keyword selector tool.

2. Understand your competition. Mine the search results for each keyword or phrase to see who else is listed in the results. These are your competitors. (If you don't recognize them as such, you may be using the wrong keywords.)

3. Target your market. Some more obscure keywords and phrases may only be used by a small segment of your market. If you want to target this audience, then use those keywords on at least one page in your site.

4. Write for search engines. Write a Web page for each product or service you want searchers to find on your site and use the search terms in the copy. For example, If you're selling running shoes, say "high-performance running shoe" and not "high-performance shoe," whilch would not turn up in a search for "running shoe."

5. Help searchers find what they want. Most people think they need to drive traffic to their home page, then from there to the right page. But free listings can turn up any page in a site. Every page needs to orient searchers to your site. If they don't find what they want on that page, direct them elsewhere in your site.