Google Local: If you don’t already have one Create an account on Google Local. Enter your company name, address, phone number and website. Verify the information with a postacard or telephone call. In a few weeks you will help you get a map listing for your company name or industry and town.

Google Coupons: Coupons are a great way to bring new customers into your business or remind old customers that you’re still around. Google has a free coupon tool that puts your coupon on relevant local searches.

Google Base: Google base is part of Google’s one box service. Google uses it to try giving the most appropriate answer from different data sources. If you are selling products you can upload feeds automatically into Google Base and often get preferential placement. You can also upload your business, or special event.

Yahoo Local: Yahoo local is a directory organized by category and geographic location. You can get a basic listing in Yahoo Local for free. People searching for your business or industry can find your listing

Get Reviews: An integral part of the Yahoo Local listings are reviews. Ask your good customers to write reviews for you on Yahoo local. Businesses with higher ratings will get preferential listings.

YellowPages.com: Yellow Pages have a strong brand name and recognition, and are still used by many people today. They offer a few levels of listings the most basic is free.

Press Releases: Doing something newsworthy? If you are you can always submit a press release for free at PRLeap.com. Be sure to check out their tips like 25 Action Words for Writing a Newsworthy Headline and Why Localizing a Press Release to a ZIP Code and City Matters.

Free Blog Promotion Tools: Does your company have a website or are you thinking of adding one? Websites like Technorati and mybloglog can help you gain exposure, visitors, readers, and subscribers to your blog.

Free Directory Advertising: It doesn’t get any easier than trying free advertising. Go to BOTW.org and sign up for a free 60 day advertising listing.

Create a Lens at Squidoo: Squidoo has a nice easy to use interface that allows you to give information to your visitors. You can talk about your business specifically or the services or products you provide.

LinkedIn: Join LinkedIn and get connected with people you know and make connections with people you don’t through introductions. Look at the new Questions and Answers section and try and be genuinely helpful. Follow the axiom of ‘Givers Gain’ and you may generate a few leads for yourself from your goodwill.

Email Signatures: Be sure to add your URL to all of your outgoing email. Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change it a several times a year so people notice it again.

Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free ebooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.

For more tips on how to promote your local business be sure to check out my complete series on local search tips, tricks and secrets or visit my local search page on Squidoo.

There are a couple of sites and Internet Marketers who claim that they have the secret to the best free traffic generation ideas; however, a number of these techniques don’t yield any success. In any case,it important to follow new traffic generation techniques like using Twitter and LinkedIn to drive traffic to a dating site…

1. Write and submit articles to article directories. This is a great techniques that not only brings traffic, but also builds back links to your site. The articles have to be unique, interesting and submitted to multiple directories. I am testing the services of an article submission company right now. They claim that they submit an article with two links in the author box to 865 different article directories. The cost is reasonable and I expect a large number of back links to be registered by search engines. If this submission would be successful, then I would repeat this process at least three to four times a month.

2. Use answers.yahoo.com to your advantage. It is very easy to get registered with answers.yahoo.com. Once registered, you would be able to answer questions that other folks post and add links to your sites in the body of the answers. I am getting good traffic from answers.yahoo.com.

3. If your site is related to video, then create an account on veoh.com and start posting comments. Include links to your sites in the comments you post. This would give you traffic plus back links. Just be careful and do not overdo it. If you post too many links/comments at once then your account will be deleted.

4. Create a video about your site or service and post it on YouTube.com. You will get good traffic and strong back links. One of my websites got PR2 within a month from the date I created it after I uploaded several videos to YouTube.com. Hint: when writing a video description, make sure to include the url of your site on the first line.

5. Post in forums and add links to your sites to your signature. I am getting a couple of hundreds visits from forums.digitalpoint.com a week alone.

6. Post quality comments on other peoples’ blogs. This approach would give your traffic and a huge number of back links.

7. Submit your site/blog to directories. Do not do it yourself as it takes a huge amount of time. Use one of many directory submission services on forums.digitalpoint.com. Just yesterday I submitted my OBlife.com to 1,100 directories for just 18$.

8. Add a bookmark button to each page of your site.

9. Create custom 404 pages. Most of my websites redirect to the home page when 404 page is requested. Thus I do not lose the visitor, visitor gets to see my website instead.

10. Create an RSS feed and burn it with FeedBurner.

11. Add a “tell-a-friend” form to your pages.

12. Use social bookmarking sites to promote your pages. I am getting hundreds of visitors a day from StumbleUpon alone.

13. Email Marketing. Create a list. Mail it and provide offers or incentives that drive people to your site.

Traffic generation is not a hard job at all. You just need to make a checklist and decide which activities you want to use for your sites.

Use these techniques and best of luck for your website.
–Thanks–

Do NOT put all your eggs in one basket. There are several other ways to drive traffic to your site and depending on just one, like Google, is just plain bad marketing efforts.

Yahoo, Yahoo’s YPN, and other search engines along with pay-per-click programs can bring you extra traffic and maybe even more sales.

I currently have Google Adsense and Yahoo’s YPN ads on my site and I can tell you right now that Yahoo’s YPN is paying me THREE times the amount that Adsense is paying. Why? Not sure, because both ads are featured on the same based keywords. I divided pages up equally between Adsense ads and YPN ads and Yahoo is the “bigger Daddy”.

“He who only puts one iron in the fire will not set the world alight”

Distribute your advertising in several different ways. Test, test, then test again. Optimize your pages for good content and keyword density and then let the search engines gobble that. DON’T optimize your pages for Google only. You might number 1 today and then number 378 as soon as they have their next algorythm change. Nothing they do is “personal”, but it sure fells like it when they dig in your pocket after all the work you did to make THEM happy. What I don’t understand is why Google is constantly changing except that it gives engineers something to do for those hefty paychecks. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Google is constantly “fixing” a well oiled machine.

The other day I was searching for business loans and the first few pages were all listings from the UK even though I was on the main search engine, and not the Google.uk. If I had wanted a loan, I had to search several pages deep to find on in the US.

Pay per click sites:

1. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a well organized system.

http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/

2. Miva distributes your keyword text ads throughout a distribution partner network.

http://www.miva.com

3. GoClick no monthly fee, no startup fee, and low 1 cent CPC

http://www.goclick.com/

4. 7Search results appear in over 35% of the top 150 search engines

http://www.payperranking.com/

5. Kanoodle has partnerships with sites CNET, DogPile, NetZero and more

http://www.kanoodle.com/about/advertise.cool

6. Search123 sports some cool tools to help you control your pay-per-click budget.

http://search123.com

There are MANY other search engines and advertising opportunities for you out there. Just look around to find them. After awhile you will see that Google is not the only phone company in town even though they act like it!