Combining SEO With AdWords

Paid traffic is just one piece to the search marketing puzzle.  It's only a small fraction of the traffic available. A top free ranking can offer you far more.

Because of its positioning, a top free ranking attracts visitors who either don't look at the paid ads or don't click on them because they are looking for free information.

What's more, all of the traffic you get doesn't cost you a cent.  It's all profit.

This is why it's a good idea to at least have some type of focus on capturing free search listings. 

How can you do this?

Likely the easiest way is to create a blog.  These are great to use because they allow you to naturally and quickly capture search positions.  Just post quality content several times a week and over time, you grow your free search traffic.  Probably the best place to get started with a blog is http://www.WordPress.org.  

Other methods include:

• Writing and submitting articles to article directories, such as Ideamarketers.com or ezinearticles.com.  
• Writing and submitting press releases to PR news sites, such PRWeb.com.  
• Submitting quality content to social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com. 
• Creating and submitting videos to YouTube.com and other video submission sites.  
• Creating lenses or hubs for Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com
• Submitting to as many high-quality directories or sites that accept your content as you can find.  There are countless sites out there that accept articles, videos, reports, or other content.  

When submitting to these sites, it's important that you include the keywords you want to get ranked for in the search engines.  Look for terms where there is not too much competition, but you are also likely to receive a good amount of targeted traffic.  For instance, if you were writing an article or a blog post and you were selling health supplements, then you might include specific supplement names in your title. You would not use a general term like "Improve health" as your title. 

There's a lot more to getting free search positions, but these tactics we've just talked about are a great place to start.  We'll talk more about optimizing for the free listings in the days to come and how this ties into your AdWords advertising.