So you want to grow the site and you don’t want to spend money on pay per click. Ok so now you also know you need backlinks as well. What to do…Well you need to create some buzz with the site and one of the best free ways of doing that is….drum roll please.  How about a blog? They’re free, user friendly, and you can fill them with content till the cows come home.

If the content is worthy, then other blogs and websites start to carry the feed because you are saying something other than blowing your own horn. Now thats content. Don’t steal or borrow someone else’s content either, unless you have their permission or you give them their just due or mad props.

By creating a content worthy site or blog, the links/back links will happen. The old adage if you build it, they will come…doesn’t quite work in the cyber world. You have to lift a finger so to speak to let people know you are out there and that you have something to say.

Now if you have  strictly a commerce site, then you probably are going to have to break down and use ppc to drive traffic. because chances are you are selling a product that someone else is selling and thus, they may be more settled in with backlinks, keywords, pages and general content. With commerce sites, people are not looking for content, they are looking for deals and there is a lot of competition.

But this doesn’t mean that you ignore your natural ranking as some site owners are wont to do since they are pouring substantial dollars into their pay per click campaign. On the contrary, their biggest mistake is not to continue to optimize the site with the SE’s in mind. You have to strike a balance.

So in order to get a high Page Rank, not only do you optimize, optimize, optimize, but you must also have people linking into your sites, as well as developing pages of content. Remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.