By Jason Markum
I love free (or nearly free) Internet Marketing Methods. I can’t help it. I know that I can plunk some cash into my adwords account and almost instantly stream a flood of traffic to a web site…I know it…but I still LOVE to get that traffic for free, even if it takes a long time for that traffic to come around and even if it takes a huge effort on my part to get it.
That’s probably one of the main reasons why I’ve always loved Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing methods. The idea that I can do a few things to tweak the SEO of my web site, then do a little work getting backlinks that point to my site…and then watch a floodgate of steady free targeted visitors begin to flow into my web site; is intoxicating. And I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here! (Or at least you do if you’ve been around very long in the Internet Marketing world).
And it was especially the case back in the earlier days of the Internet, say around 1996 or so. Back then you could literally load your meta tags up with hundreds of keywords and then shoot up to the top of the rankings at the “search engines” (I use quotes because they were only vaguely what we would think of as search engines today!).
Of course, that sort of thing quickly stopped working as the search engines became more sophisticated, but the idea is still the same today. Do a few things to your site in order to make it more attractive to the search engines and enjoy tons of free traffic in exchange.
But is all that traffic actually free? That question got me thinking….
Today, onpage SEO factors are only a VERY minor part of getting a web site ranked well at the search engine. Backlinks are massively more important, and backlinks take a HUGE amount of time to do it right. Sure you can spam your site onto all the social media type sites like digg and reddit and mixx and twitter etc and you will get some short term bumps, but they never lead to long term sustainable search engine rankings.
No, today you have to put a lot of time into building link bait in order to get others to link to you (and let’s not forget the fact that you have to get people to your site TO BEGIN WITH before they link to you...which takes time and money).
Other than that you can use article marketing to get back links, and I do that a lot… but it takes a lot of time and effort to pump out fifty to a hundred articles to the major article directories because I don’t spin them or duplicate them on different directory sites.
So when you think about it…all that “free” SEO traffic isn’t really all that free after all. If you value your time at more than minimum wage, free SEO can actually become prohibitively expensive!
But still…it’s still just so much fun!