And now for something completely different....
Anyone got their own website, and if so, how do they find it best to promote it?
I have been using Overture and Adwords, and seem to be shelling more out then what comes in.
I am not a keen fan on reciprocal links (as you never have the time to reverse check, nor the time to remove people from yours).
Anyone any good ideas?
ATB
OJ
Trying to remember what I did when I first started mine.. I think I submitted it to as many search engines as possible (but only on places where it didn't cost me any money! LOL)... as my website is my username listing on here and eBay meant that the "name" got used a lot... I must have done something right as my website gets lots of traffic/sales with no money being spent out by me for them to find it. :-)
wow over my head there
too many big words in a post can create a really long post not good if you got a short intake in memory
carp what was this about i forgot now
have got a google ad-words account for my website and plan to close it down in a few months as if the site isnt being picked up better in the search engine after 6mths of ad words campaign then it just aint gonna lol.
meta tags are vital - get them sorted asap but make sure you dont go over around 20 words as the more you have the more of a NEGATIVE effect it can have. them spiders and bots dont like lots of tags to search thru for some reason. I have no idea of the logic behind this but it was advice given by a professional IT/web designer thingy bloke.
make sure you have your site content somewhere down the side - usually the left and DONT put any advert blocks like Jeeves or google above your site map. the bots tend to list you on the first bots of the site they hit and it was showing our site as being famous for having Jeeves than what we actaully do *lmao* cos we had our jeeves search box above the site content. swapped the jeeves to the right of the page and OMG we were being hit by 30 or more bots every day and we shot up the search engines!!
have a sig below all your posts in forums ... some sites let you have pretty sigs and my DH and I use this one wherever possible:
one one forum alone we have had over 500 hits in a month from the signature!
hope this helps
Vik xxx
Also getting other sites to link to yours also helps it up the google list. My site has been talked about on loads of message boards.
Also make one of those infamous 'email attachments' with your website name on.
I confess that I am responsible for 'chav top trumps'.
A rather appropriate title for me to reply to.
To begin with there are two main points.
Point 1. Whatever the advertising type companies try to get you to pay for, you can do for yourself if you want to put the effort into it.
Point 2. Website popularity takes time. Anyone who promises you hundreds of thousands of hits within a few weeks is lying to you.
Now, as for the rest: you are going to get all sorts of advice from all sorts of people and places and a lot of it will contradict what other people have told you. BUT, that doesn't mean that the information is wrong.
The difficultly facing most website owners is that different search engines can use different techniques and preferences in how they collect information, or even what information they collect.
Personally I use every single technique that I can find mentioned on the grounds that it will appeal to one or more search engines even if other ones don't like it.
You could do worse than researching - and making use of - the following techniques.
META tags within the HEAD portion of your documents.
META data within the BODY portion of your documents.
Submission of your completed, relevant, first page to every FREE search engine you can find.
A search via Google for "free search engines" will also turn up a list of auto-submitter sites. Many of these sites will be mostly useless but if they are free and only 5% useful, then it's better than nothing.
Get reciprocal links with websites offering a similar content to your own. Some search engines will rank your site higher if it is linked to by other quality, established sites. If the sites linking to you have a high placement it can also improve your site's placement.
Get links from any other site going. Sometimes people can see your link and be interested even if the content is vastly different to whatever they were just looking at. Having said that, don't get links from inappropriate sites. You wouldn't, for example, want to link from a site about intestinal ailments if your site sells food.
Make sure that the page you submit to the search engines has enough text on it to adequately describe the goods or services you offer. Include words in the text that you would expect people to use if they were searching for whatever you offer.
Use either an ISP or a hit counter than enables you to see where people were referred from. If that site was a search engine, click the referring URL and see what words they used and what site placement your site was given in the listing. If people are only gaining a partial hit (if they search for, for example, MONTY PYTHON SCRIPTS, but your site only has MONTY PYTHON on the front page, see if you can add the word SCRIPTS as well. The more terms that can be regularly found on your page, the more your hits and ranking will increase.
No matter how tempting it is to have a 100% Flash website, or a Flash only entrance page, don't do it. You should always have text available for search engines - and visitors - to take notice of.
Always take a look at what other sites are doing.
Search for your own products or content and see which other sites get listed above yours. Go and look at what they are doing. Check the source code of their pages.
Aside from that lot, pay out a lot in bribes and say lots of prayers.
Last edited by damian_steele; 9th August 2005 at 05:41 PM.
Also, check out www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker for great examples of how NOT to do it!!
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