SEO Tips Australia

Free online classifieds are booming. They are so numerous and popular now that they are eroding the offline newspaper classified revenue in a major way. This is one of the main reasons that so many newspapers are struggling to break even now.

Not only are online classifieds effective for getting clicks - and calls if you are posting your phone details - they also confer some SEO benefit in many cases. They are very category-specific, which definitely helps in telling the search engines about your site. And a lot of them are crawled by the search engine spiders frequently since they are updated so often. Craigslist is a case in point. Apparently posting an ad on this massive, highly ranked site is one of the quickest ways to get your site indexed by Google.

While bloggers and webmasters who aren't actively selling goods and services wouldn't find much use for classifieds, anyone with a business site should consider them.

I know of the SEO benefits of free classifieds from personal experience. A couple of years ago, when I knew very little about SEO, I had a site that was advertising a flyer distribution service in Sydney. I thought that the best place to advertise it on the net was on free classified sites, so I placed ads for it on as many of these as I could find. I did do a bit of other link building - on directories mainly. But the vast majority was done on the classifieds.

A few months later I started to get phone calls from people who had found my site on Google. While they didn't flood in, they certainly trickled in pretty consistently. I had a look at my stats and saw that they were coming via a long tailed keyword search "flyer distribution Sydney" and a few variations. These were the words I had used most often in those classified ads. So they must have worked for SEO.
(Of course, it is possible that the directories alone did it. But somehow I doubt it - although I can't say that with complete confidence. Only Google knows the answer to that!)

So, while I wouldn't spend all my time link building on these sites, it's certainly worth doing a few. You may want to check that they do allow you to ad a clickable URL, and if they do, whether it is dofollow or not. But the bottom line is that these sites are growing in popularity, and the more people who see your site the better.

Googling will bring up a squillion international classifieds sites, often with sub-sections devoted to Australia. Also, there are quite a few that are locally owned and run that keep reappearing in searches. Interestingly, the other main search engines like Yahoo and Bing give you quite different results. It's a good idea to return to all these search engines and look again from time to time because there are always new classifieds sites starting up and there seems to be a lot of variation in their rankings from week to week.

Here are some that look good: LinkWizz, All2Go, SimpleTrade, ChaosAds Australia, One2Sell, Trade City, Free Ads AU, Classify Me, Trading Hub, Australia Exchange Network, Free Ad, Annonz, Bondi Classifieds, Ad an Ad, No Flies, Ocka List, iKoala Australia, Findix, Free Ads Australia, Australia Big Ads, Over Here Mate, Post a Deal, BuyAndSellAustralia, AussieZone, Oz Ads, Shopmania Classifieds, Local Note, Ads Oz, and Classifieds Here.

Some of the biggest are C Mather, Gumtree, Craigslist, Oz Free Online, InetGiant Australia, OLX Australia, Locanto, Adoos and Cracker.