There are many ways to get free advertising on the web. The tried and true way to get links to your site is by looking for relevant sites to your web site and asking for reciprocal links. For example, if you have a pet sitting business, looks for other pet sites, perhaps a pet friendly travel web site, a local vet etc. Put up a link to that site and then contact the site and ask them to put a link to your site. If you sell pet leashes across the country, look for pet camping sites, ask for dog daycares and pet sitters to link to you. Maybe even offer their clients a discount if they use the link from their site. There is good software to help you automatically manage reciprocal links you can try out here for free.

Some sites will reciprocate and some won't. One word of caution, it won't hurt you to have a link to your site from a pure link site (sometimes these are called link farms or Free For All FFA), but it may penalize your search engine ranking to have a link from your site to one of these sites.

Now, If you have either a commercial or profitable site, and you've gotten all the reciprocal links you can, it may be time to start paying for some key links. Continuing with the pet sitting business, there are several pet sitting sites that will put a link up for $10. If the site has enough traffic and is relevant to your site, then maybe its worth the investment. You are basically becoming a sponsor of that site.

If you look at the search engine pages concerning page rank, then you will realize that a link from a site with a high page rank is more valuable than a sitter with a low page rank. In fact, avoid getting links from sites with a page rank of 0.

I've talked about banner exchanges. Several of these services offer pay per view and pay per click services. I don't necessarily think banners exchanges are the way to go. Reciprocal links will help your search engine ranking while a banner exchange won't.

Another way to get links to your site is through Blogging. Blog with relevant topics and always sign your name or sign-on with the URL to your site underneath it. Blogs get indexed to. If you are offering unique products or services, write articles and submit them to sites (or create a site of your own with articles pointing back to your site). It's all about increasing your web presence. One thing to note, is just recently, Google is testing a new web tag called "no follow" that they hope to have most blog software use in the future to prevent what they called comment spam.

As for Search Engine advertising, this again depends on the economic factors of your web site. For example, this is just a free, informational web site. I make a little money from the pay to surf affiliate programs and other ads, but I would never pay to get traffic to this site. It's just not worth it for me. However, I do own a local franchise (I'm not here to plug it so it will remain nameless). Every client averages around of $750 a year for me. If I do a local postcard mailing, it cost me about $2,000 to have a company produced and mail 5,000 full color postcards. The response rate is around 1% so it costs me about  $40 for every client I get. I split a yellow page ad with 5 other franchise locations for about $400 a month. Why wouldn't I pay say $0.50 for a client to come to my web site?

Adwords
Adwords is Google's advertising program. With adwords, you basically bid on certain key words and determine the most you want to pay a month and set-up an ad. For example, say I choose the keyword "Flowers", the most I want to pay for a click is $0.25 and the most I want to spend is $20.00 a month. If a competitor id $0.10 for the word "Flowers", I would probably display ahead of them and the most I would pay would be $0.11. The second piece of Google's positioning of your ad is relevancy. If my Competitor was FTD and was advertising flowers for sale, and my ad was for tennis shoed and I display my add on the word flowers, people probably aren't going to click on my ad as much. Since my competitor will probably have a higher click through rate, they will probably display higher than me, even if I bid higher than them.

I love this program, because the minimum bid is $0.05, approval is instant, there is no monthly minimum you have to spend, it has good reporting and it allows you to track conversion if you sell something on your site. To track conversions, you just copy some code into your confirmation screen.

If you are advertising something local, Adwords is great because you can actually enter your address and set a mile radius for your ads. So say you own a Chinese restaurant in Phoenix and you have the keywords Chinese Restaurant. If someone in Boston types in Chine Restaurant, you don't want  your ad to display and to possibly have to pay for it if they click on it. You can say, only display your ad if the person doing the search is in the Phoenix area. It's a little scary what they know about the person searching if they can narrow this down to a 5 mile radius.

Adwords has two components. The ads that are displayed on Google and Google local, but you can also elect to display your ad on relevant sites. You can see more about the web masters perspective on this in the advertisers section. So back to your pet sitting service looking for reciprocal links. Browse the site before you buy any links. Some sites may want you to pay a larger amount, say $100 a year, but if they use Google's Adsense to display ads, your ad may show up  on that site for much cheaper if you advertise through Goggle.

Just a quick testimonial from me. For my franchise's site, I added a Google ad with a $0.25 maximum bid with a $20.00 cap. Within about 4 hours, I had made around $120 from two new clients. Since them, those clients have made me even more money and they were not the last one's Google sent me. I would estimate my franchise gets about $3,000 a month from clients I received through Google ads.

If you have a larger advertising budget, let Google study your site and recommend the best key words and marketing strategy. They charge you for it, but the full charge is credited back to you to use for clicks.

Be sure to check out the section on Google Cash on how to make money using Google AdWords.

Besides Google, Adwords display on ASK.com (better than paying a yearly fee to register your site), AOL and Earthlink's search engines.

If you are considering using Google Adwords, I would reccomend you can sign up for a free newsletter that includes "5 days to success with Google Adwords" here. Of course the guy giving the free tips has a product to sell as well. I don't usually push products on this site, but I have found his guide on AdWords extremely useful. It is well written and has several tips that have saved me literally hundreds of dollars a month on my advertising costs.

Using some of his tips, and the Google tutorials, I have actually had several people ask me to manage there AdWords account after seeing the success of my ads.  I charge a fee of course. So far in 2005, for about 10 hours a month, I have made over $3,000 each month tuning and managing folks adword account. Not bad for a little extra side income. This kit includes several cool tools to help you define your keywords and determine what ads work best for you. It goes over 35 examples and case studies and includes a fast start tool-kit. Even if you don't buy anything, sign up for his free 5 days to success with Google Adwords here.

Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture is similar to Adwords. Yahoo Search Marketing has made some improvements in the local search market. I still prefer Google's system just for ease of use and because of the other drawbacks of Yahoo Search Marketing. If you are serious about an internet presence, even with the drawbacks, you will still want to advertise with Yahoo.

The other drawbacks. You have to spend at least $20.00 a month per account. If you don't, then they will just charge you anyway. They have never enforced this policy on their local match so you can spend $0.10 and only get billed for that amount. Another drawback is you need to have your ads approved. It only takes 24-48 hours during regular work weeks so it is no too bad, but I like Google's automated process.

Yahoo does not use relevancy for there advertising so the highest bid gets you the highest spot. You can see the top three bids of your competitors for the same key words. I personally don't like this method because I think it gives searchers junk results and in the long run cost you more if you have a good targeted ad.

On a good note, if you sign up with Overture, they will give you a free $25 credit which should let you try them out for a month at no cost.

CitySearch
For a local business, city search works fairly well. The click charges are set for your city and category at either $0.50 or $0.75 per click based on competitiveness of the market. I get a few clients from this. I don't like that you can't set a daily limit and by looking at the stats, I will get on average 2-3 clicks a day and then a couple of times a month I get 15-16 clicks so I know their software is not checking for the same client coming back looking at my ad, going somewhere else and coming back and I am getting charged for multiple times or the same client where Adwords and Overture do a pretty good job of catching things like that.

There are numerous sites to advertise on and to get traffic from, if you own a local business, don't forget your local on-line directory, the chamber of commerce, the better business bureau. If you are nationwide, be imaginative and link partner with some great relevant sites. If you are using products to process orders, ask for a link from your vendors site.