85 (and Growing) Free Tips and Tools to Promote Your Site, Increase Your PR, and Gain Traffic

“How can I market my website?” “How can I get more traffic?” “How can I improve my pagerank and rankings in the SERPs?” “What Internet marketing tactics actually work?”

Are you the type of person asking these kinds of questions, feeling like a successful, high-traffic, money-making site is just out of reach? Do you have a limited marketing budget for your website? Then lucky for you that I’m all about PR, free promotion, and guerrilla marketing tactics! Here are some ways / tips / tools / resources to help you promote your site, increase your pagerank, and gain traffic, all for FREE! (I’ll continually add to this list when I can, so check back!)

Increase Your PR and Search Visibility

  • Link-building
    Building incoming links (especially one-way, relevant incoming links, from high PR sites) is like gathering “votes” to your website or a specific page within it. The more “votes,” the more popular SEs like Google think your site is, allowing you to increase your pagerank and rankings in the SERPs (among other things).

    • Free Directories (submit your website to free directories – preferably non-reciprocal directories, for one-way backlinks to your site) The directories below offered free, non-reciprocal link submissions at the time of this posting.
    • Your Sites / Blogs / Pages (There are many services allowing you to set up a free website, Web page, profile, blog, or similar places where you can create relevant content to your main site, and add backlinks or RSS feeds pointing to the site you’re building backlinks for – try to optimize these sites well for the Web, so they get their own PR and a bit of search engine exposure). Here are some services that allow you to set up your own website, blog, profile, or similar pages:
      • Squidoo.com – Build “lenses” for free on any niche subject you want. You can include links or RSS feeds to your primary website, can use it to promote your products or services, and can even make money in the process by using ad modules or affiliate ads. Squidoo lenses tend to get Google PR pretty easily.
      • Microsoft’s OfficeLive Basics – You can get a free domain name and Web hosting from Microsoft, but you’ll need to use their site-building tools (best idea if you want a bigger site, but basic, or a unique domain name). You can choose to transfer the domain later if you want to host your own site, but when I tried this, it wasn’t made easy (and I’m still trying to get the domain moved).
      • Wordpress.com – Free hosted blog on a subdomain of Wordpress.com.
      • Blogger.com – Free hosted blog from Google on a blogspot.com subdomain.
      • MySpace.com – A social networking site, where you can include a personal profile. Make the profile content (“about” section) related to the content of your website, and include a backlink.
      • LiveJournal.com – A free hosted blog / journal – you can add a link section pointing to your site(s).
      • Suite101.com – Sign up for a member account on this content network to be able to participate in discussions, and fill out your member profile with a link to your site(s).
      • Blog.com – Free hosted blogs.
      • AIM Pages – Sign up for a free AIM account for email and their instant messenger, and set up an AIM page with links to your website(s).
      • Multiply.com – Set up a profile on this social networking site, and link to your site(s) in your blog post
    • Forum Signatures (Find forums related to your site’s niche, and add a link to your site in your forum signature – being careful to follow forum rules. Then make quality posts in the forum to have your link displayed in each.)
    • Social Media (Use social bookmarking services and social content / news aggregators to build one-way backlinks. Just be sure not to spam the services, and follow their submission rules. Many social media sites have nofollow rules on their external links, meaning they won’t count towards backlinks for SE purposes, but they can still lead to traffic, so they’re includedThe following list of sites are available free social media sites.)
    • Blog Comments (Look for blogs related to the niche of your website, and leave relevant comments. Most will include a link back to your site automatically, or you can include it in the comment itself, as long as you’re not breaking the blog’s rules or spamming.)
    • Article Directories (Write articles related to the niche of your website, and include a “resource box” with your name, credentials, and site URL. The articles are then made available to publishers who add your content to their website(s), including the link back to you).

Get Publicity for Your Website

Post to Twitter Post to Delicious Post to Digg Post to Facebook Post to StumbleUpon

Related posts:

  1. Ten Tips for Promoting Your Website as an Independent Professional
  2. Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website for Free with Xenu Link Sleuth
  3. Press Releases Made Easy – E-Book
  4. Five Web Promotion Tactics You Probably Haven't Tried
  5. Press Release Writing Tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Online Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “85 (and Growing) Free Tips and Tools to Promote Your Site, Increase Your PR, and Gain Traffic”

  1. Dave says:
    March 22, 2007 at 2:24 am

    Great post! You have some links there to some sites of interest that I wasnt previously aware of. Specifically a few of the press release sites and microsoft office live. thanks

  2. PressAbout says:
    April 16, 2007 at 6:40 am

    Another Free Press Release site is http://www.PressAbout.com

  3. Free Email Cards says:
    October 10, 2007 at 11:09 pm

    Glad to see someone is staying on top of things.

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