No Comments Written by Robert on August 12, 2008 – 6:25 pm

Craigslist is the ultimate site for advertising your products locally. Whether you are looking for a job, an apartment, or a new family pet, Craigslist has a listing for it. With over 400 sites dedicated to 400 different cities worldwide, your local Craigslist can deliver highly targeted traffic for free.

Posting ads on Craigslist regularly can be a great help in getting your Web site indexed by search engines, which can result in more traffic for your Web site. For example, you can use Craigslist to post listings about new products on your Web site. Keep in mind that whenever you post anything on Craigslist you should include the URL of your Web site.

Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995. Today Craigslist has established itself in around 450 cities in 50 countries and is growing quickly. The site is a centralized network of online communities that offers free classified advertisements. Among the categories that Craigslist encompasses are job listings, internships, housing, dating, and online sales. The site serves over 5 billion page views per month and has become the leading classifieds service in any medium.

Craigslist is the ultimate site for advertising

Although Craigslist can be a useful source of traffic to your Web site, you must understand and adhere to the Craigslist terms of service or risk having your Web site and listings banned from using the service. For example, do not post too many listings at once, and avoid posting multiple times in the same category. In addition, you should place your listings in the most appropriate category related to your product; you should not use multiple aliases attached to the same Web site.

When you make your post, remember to select the option that prevents people from seeing your e-mail address. You do not want Craigslist members e-mailing you directly or automated spambots picking up your address. Use H1 and H2 headings for the most important keywords.

You can also bold anything important within the body text of the post. Generally Craigslist posts expire after about 45 days, so you should post your ad again so that Google and other search engines continue to index and list it in their search results.

Local search is becoming more popular as local services such as Yellow Book and Craigslist become more relevant to searchers. Mobile search also targets these local markets, and with cell phone Web browsers on the rise, you should have a presence in the local search results.

Local search-engine optimization, or SEO, is easier than regular SEO because the keyword phrases you are targeting are longer and less sought-after. Be sure you register your business with Google Maps and use platforms such as Craigslist and JudysBook to increase the locally relevant content pointing to your site.

You also need to be sure that you are not just targeting city and state names, but also the zip codes and area codes of these places. Include the neighborhood names, local slang words, and landmarks that people use to describe the areas around them.

On the pay-per-click side, the average cost per click for a keyword with a city and state tagged onto it is much lower than the keyword by itself. The search engine automatically displays these ads both to searchers that enter a city name and to those that merely access the site from an IP address in that geographical area.