SEO on a low/no budget?

Hi all

I have done SEO before, mainly blog commenting and managed to get to 3rd for a pretty competitive keyword, but that was a few years ago.

What's a good and effective method that's free/really cheap going to help me promote sites?

Thanks!

Guest blogging is a great way to get good links for free. You just have to find people willing to let you guest blog and you have to write descent content.

Blog commenting still works but it's not nearly as effective as it used to be. Web 2.0's are great ways to build links, but again they aren't as effective as they used to be.

Social bookmarks are great on the good sites such as SU, Digg, and Reddit if you can get some votes. The best way I've found to SEO for cheap is to create a bunch of web 2.0 blogs and build them up and link to your website.

Also don't forget social media. Hit up Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to get traffic quickly as SEO takes time.

PulpF said:

Hi all

I have done SEO before, mainly blog commenting and managed to get to 3rd for a pretty competitive keyword, but that was a few years ago.

What's a good and effective method that's free/really cheap going to help me promote sites?

Thanks!

Click to expand...

Quality and effective Link building is the answer to your question.But still with all those daily updates going on in google lately due to G+ effect I guess it is safer to try on old tactics until the whole thing normalize and we can actually see what Google has in store for us.
For now try out the .edu and .gov packages.If you want to spend some money then go for the BST section in BHW else harvest your own set and start building now.Next step think later..

hispdcha is spot on when he mentions guest blogging as a great free source, but you really gotta spend time reaching out to people via email (and providing some content for them they would actually be interested in using.)

Despite a slight SEO budget I can use at my full-time SEO job, I still stick with entirely free and non-automated methods (can't risk any de-indexing here or I'm out of a job)

A good way to get started is to look into 30 day free trials for some more popular article submission services.

PostRunner and BuildMyRank both have 30 day trials you can use to get a good amount of "in-article" backlinks - you just need about 300+ words of content for each backlink you want.

On top of that you could do a few more things for free:

-manual directory submissions
-Squidoo pages/other web2.0 sites
-Yahoo answer hijacking (ie answering your own questions with a link to your site - good thread on it recently)
-Sweepstake/Freebie sites - if you have a contest running or something to give away submit to these
-article directories
-Testimonials

By "testimonials" i'm referring to basically calling up any service providers you've worked with in relation to the website your working on (much easier if you are working with an established business) and offering a testimonial for their business in exchange for a link to your site at the end of the testimonial.

I've recently gotten a PR7 backlink using the testimonial method. I ended up calling lead sources we have, document shredders, ISPs, phone "dudes", IT companies, email providers.

Pretty sure I even sent an email out to our AdWords account rep hahah! (no dice there...)

Thanks loads all

hispdcha said:

Also don't forget social media. Hit up Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to get traffic quickly as SEO takes time.

Click to expand...

What kind of techniques on those sites would provide quick traffic?

I found twitter has quick traffic, but you need to be careful you don't get banned, plus TA pro is a must moving forward..

hispdcha said:

Guest blogging is a great way to get good links for free. You just have to find people willing to let you guest blog and you have to write descent content.

Blog commenting still works but it's not nearly as effective as it used to be. Web 2.0's are great ways to build links, but again they aren't as effective as they used to be.

Social bookmarks are great on the good sites such as SU, Digg, and Reddit if you can get some votes. The best way I've found to SEO for cheap is to create a bunch of web 2.0 blogs and build them up and link to your website.

Also don't forget social media. Hit up Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to get traffic quickly as SEO takes time.

Click to expand...

This^ and offline geurilla marketing. People often forget the value of marketing to folks offline.

Why do you need money to optimize your website...
SEO costs nothing.

And, do not run after quick traffic... every technique takes time to show results.

Social networking websites, indeed, is a good source of traffic... but it demands time and dedication.

A few tips of getting traffic from networking websites,
- Create an interactive profile
- Publish quality content on your profile pages
- Share good niche related videos and links through your profile
- Add little humor angle in your conversation
- Try to make one on one conversation, this will help in establishing personal bonding with your audience
- Dig out people of your niche and follow them
- Talk about your website with other people and try to pull some audience (stay away from blatant promotion)

Get into Google PLus early, plenty of opportunities, especially now that not only offer they do follow links but also affect your friends and your friends friends serps when searching with their google account logged on...

My site have large traffic from Facebook and twitter. And now trying Youtube

I'm also cash strapped and by reading this thread it's made me realise that there is no quick fix and hard work is the way to go. For all the great tips and advice I wish to thank everyone sharing their knowlegde. I'm sure that one day I will also be able to post a tip or two for someone that needs advice.

Basically, go after just about any kind of links you can get.

Mostly these are things you can do yourself without paying anyone:

• social bookmarking
• article marketing
• press releases
• blog commenting
• create your own blog
• rss submissions
• social media marketing
• get links on web2.0 sites
• video spreading
• document spreading

Don't fall back on doing just one kind of linkbuilding...build up a natural-looking mix of different kinds of links, different kinds of anchor text, and a mixture of follow/nofollow links.

You should do it at a regular pace...but just start and don't ever stop.