But now, website visitors are more informed, and have been conditioned to ignore these kinds of obvious advertising. Unless you have a company with high brand-name recognition and deep pockets, you need to spend your marketing dollars in a way that translates into more visitors and greater sales.

If you are a website owner looking to increase traffic to your site, you can choose from many forms of advertising. You can list your program with an affiliate market place such as Commission Junction or ShareBucks. You can bid on keywords using Google's Adwords program or Yahoo's Content Match which are guaranteed to bring a flood of new visitors to your doorstep. You can also purchase banner ads on a CPM basis from individual websites that serve your target demographic.

Many of these programs succeed in bringing you both the quantity and quality of new visitors you desire. However, the cost of each program is significant. Even, a simple 468x60 banner on the homepage of a popular website could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. With that in mind, let's consider a cheaper, equally effective, search engine-friendly form of website promotion - static text links.

Static text links are cropping up everywhere across the net. You can find them in search results, emails, forums, articles, and even personal blogs. They have the advantage of being small and unobtrusive. They don't scream out "I'm an ad - Please click me!" They often receive higher click-through rates than the massive skyscraper ads appearing right next to them. They are also much cheaper than picture and video ads.

Buying link-only ads or text links with small descriptions can be a cost-effective way of promoting your site. You can buy links from a market place, which gives you more selection (at a slightly higher price). Or you can buy links directly from your target advertiser. Links can be bought for as little as $5 a month. You often have the choice of buying a link on a single page or buying site-wide links.

An added advantage to static text link advertising is the increase in one-way links to your site that are indexed by the search engines. Buying a few well-placed ads on a web page with a high Google PageRank, can increase your website PageRank substantially, and within just a few months. Of course, you will also get some human visitors who will follow those links to your website.

It is never best to put all your eggs in one basket and rely solely on one form of advertising. But if your budget is small, text link advertising should be an integral part of your marketing campaign.

You can also increase your search engine rankings and your traffic through free advertising. You can post and answer threads in a few forums that allow you to include a link to your website. There are many such forums that are indexed by the search engine spiders. Many site owners write articles and submit them to article directories with a few links to their websites in the "About the Author" resource box. This is an excellent way to position yourself as an authority in your field while bringing in targeted visitors to your site.

In all, there are many different ways to promote your website online. If you have the money, you can buy quality traffic and increase your search engine positioning quickly. If you are not working with a large marketing budget, cheap paid text links and free links posted in forums and article directories will get you nice results over a longer time span.