Free Traffic Vs Paid Traffic

Traffic coming to a site can be divided broadly into

• Free Traffic - Traffic from Search Engines and networking sites.
• Paid Traffic - Traffic from paid advertising programs and other softwares.

For real and longstanding results,free traffic is more preferable.Because this kind of traffic comes from people who want your content or products or have similar ideas as you do and want to share the information.These people won't mind to come back to your site (if your content is good) time and again to read your posts.
Paid traffic on the other hand,comes from people who are forced to see your pages.Your pages go to them,they don't come to your pages.Of course if your site is smart enough,they would not mind bookmarking it.But this happens rarely because people hardly read unexpected sites which come before them like pop ups and pop unders etc.Even if they bookmark your site for the moment,it is unlikely that they would take a serious second look at your site.

Free Traffic can be further categorised as

• Referral Traffic - Traffic generated from Social networking sites like Mybloglog,technorati.
• Traffic from Search Engines.
• Traffic generated from Link exchange.

Referral traffic is constant but Search Engine traffic is more diverse and can expose your site to more visitors.But if your site is not there in top 10 pages of the search engine results,it is impossible that you get traffic from the search engine.So you should tune your site friendly enough to search engine so that it can find you out easily.This method is what is called SEO.
Search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders” that visit websites from all over the internet and gather information regarding web pages that are searched by the people. This is otherwise known as having your website crawled.
After crawling the WebPages on your site, the gathered content is stored in a huge searchable database of documents which make up the search engine’s “index”. The search engine arranges this information in various searchable fields, so that when a queried the search engine can scan billions of documents and completes this in fractions of a second.
To make your pages search engine friendly, you have to

1. Tone your keywords and smart usage of keywords.
2. Interlinking of pages of your site.
3. Toning the Meta tags - though it is said that meta tags are dead,some search engines still use meta tags and meta tags are of great help for social book marking and networking.

Link Exchange is a very good means for generating serious readers only if the exchange takes place organically and not through softwares or by thrid parties.Exchanging links from similar sites as yours brings people who are actually interested in your site.These people in no time form your inner circle of readers.Once relationship is established between readers,it is easy to publicise your site.

Nofollow to Check Link Spam

Google Introduced 'Nofollow', a special tag system.
Due to the burst of blogs and eMarketers, comments span,link spam has been increasing.People leave comments and their links as comments or somehow manage to add their site link at other sites.This has created a nuisance in the blogosphere.

This is what Google says : If you're a blogger (or a blog reader), you're painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites' search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site." This is called comment spam, we don't like it either, and we've been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists

Msn search and Yahoo have given their support to Google in this regard.Many sofware companies have already come up and engaged themselves with Google in building the nofollow software.Once the software is uploaded,all the links in the comments (links which appear after 'posted by') will include the 'nofollow' tag,that means all those links would be useless ( to the author and to the commenters).

Wikipedia is going to be affected a lot by this 'Nofollow' tag.Because Wikepedia is built by innumerable people whose took lot of pain to nourish it all these days.Now their links would be left out,their links would only have an importance of a 'wikipedia' inbound link,losing their individuality.It may lose its reputation and the number of interested authors at wikipedia would dramatically fall down.
Nofollow also has some good news for wikepedia.Wikipedia is the largest target of Link spam.Though it disagreed to 'nofollow' in the beginning,now it has accepted to adopt nofollow.But most of the SEO gurus are optimistic that wikipedia would develop another software for itself in near future in order to save its authors.

While thats the case with Wikipedia,even bloggers have their own share of bad news.Nofollow would not only check comment spam but also legitimate links which are supposed to improve their page rank.It is being considered as a double endged knife by SEO experts.For Bloggers, only a few bloggers are going to get benefited from this 'nofollow' because those who get comment and link spams must be daily users of the internet and the only reason why they keep the comments in their page is to increase their page rank.Removing a few comments a day wont be a big problem for daily users.

On the whole, there is going to be a dramtic and sudden change in SEO because of 'nofollow'

Link Exchange

Link exchange plays a very important role in improving the Search Engine Popularity of your site.
Search Engine Crawlers crawl up to your site through the links you have rooted on various sites.
Always have an welcoming attitude towards people who want to exchange links with you.
Surf and read blogs of the topics which you are interested in and try to leave a sensible,informative comment.
Regular reading and commenting of other blogs will let you Improve your Blog and increases its visibility in the blogosphere.
Some sites which offer Link exchange -
thebest25sites.com
gotlinks.com
infowizards.com
link2me.com
linkalizer.com
linkexchanged.com - Increase your rankings with easy to use reciprocal links software.
Link Exchange and Webmaster tools - InfoWizards link exchange and webmaster tools is a great resource where webmasters exchange links and find useful tools and information to help their web development efforts.
linkmarket.com
telalinks.com
The Link Exchange - Your ultimate resource for link exchange!
uklinkexchange.co.uk - Easy to use
Web Site Promotion 4 Web Marketing. Web Marketing Australia, search engine marketing, viral marketing, PPC.
whitegyr.com
1-sun-web-site-promotion.com