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Ways to Get Website Traffic You have your website up, but how do you get people to know about it? If you don't already have a built in visitor stream and most people don't, then you need to actively go out and get visitors. It isn't that hard and doesn't take that much time, but there are scams out there so be careful. This section explains what you should do to get website traffic, what you shouldn't and what you should watch out for: The best way to get visitors is by getting a good ranking in one of the main search engines like Google. There are less than 10 search engines that account for something like 98% of all web traffic. These are the search engines you need to try to get listed in. You can either submit by hand or you can pay a service to submit your site to the search engines for you. A lot of the pay submission services are rip offs, but not all. I like the submission services at Fast Easy Websites for a couple of reasons. One, if you use them for your domain and hosting it's just really convenient to use their service for this and two, for just $39.95/year you can submit a url to a lot of the main search engines and directories with just a click of a button. Not only that they also analyze your site for you and tell you in simple easy to understand language what you need to do to optimize it so it will rank better in the search engines. For the price it simply can't be beat. For more information on it or to sign up, click here. If you want to submit by hand, here are the main search engines you need to submit to and how to do it. . Google uses spider technology to add sites to their database. What this means is that they have a spider-like robot which goes from website to website. You can submit your site by hand to Google here or you can wait for the Google spider to find your site.How will it find your website? Since spiders go from site to site, if a link to your website appears on someone else's site then Googlebot (the name of the Google spider) will follow the link from their site to yours. The more links you have the higher your ranking and the more traffic you will get. Some people figure if one link is good, a thousand links are better. Well, sort of. Google realized that some people were just submitting their website link to Free For All Links pages just so they could get a lot of incoming links and increase their ranking. Google put a stop to that and for the most part doesn't give any weight to these links so if you see any offers for 100,000 links for $19.95 just ignore them because they won't help you. Google gives more weight to links that are on a related topic to yours. So let's say that your site is about cats and you sell cat supplies. Any links from a cat or pet-related directory or page will carry more link weight than a link from a site which is about something unrelated like astronomy. For more information about how to get links and link partners, check out the link partners section below. Google snapshot: Google only updates about once a month. Your best way to get in is through links from a site already listed in Google. Do NOT submit your site by hand more than once a week. Google will think you are spamming and may penalize you which means they won't list your site at all.DMOZ - this is a human-edited directory and it's important because Google gets some of it's results from DMOZ and listings in DMOZ carry a lot of link weight with Google. To submit to DMOZ, go here and select the category that best fits your website. Once you find the cateogry, click on the Add Url button and submit your website. Tips for getting in DMOZ: Do NOT submit more than once. That is super important. If you do, you will get banned for spamming and your site will never be listed. Make sure your site is ready. If it isn't 100% finished and looking as good as you can possibly make it then don't submit it. You only get one shot and you don't want to blow it. Always make sure to submit in the right category. Do not put a lot of sales type language in the site description box. See what others in your category say and put that. Flowery sales description are edited out. Yahoo - it costs $299/year for a product or sales site to be listed in Yahoo. That doesn't guarantee a listing either. The $299 just guarantees that they will consider listing your site. Personally, I don't list in Yahoo. The search engine landscape changes pretty frequently, but right now I think it's not a good use of $299. Currently Yahoo's pay results are intermingled with Google results so if you get in Google you will show up in Yahoo for free. Inktomi - Inktomi is a search engine that shows up in MSN, About.com, Overture and more. You have to pay to get in, but you are guaranteed a listing for a full year. The cost is $39 for the first url and $25 for each url after that. Please note that you are guaranteed a listing, but you aren't guaranteed a specific ranking. If you have the money I would do both Fast Easy Websites submission service and Inktomi, but if money is tight I would just go with the one at Fast Easy Websites. It's just 95 cents more and it allows you to easily submit to Google, Fast, and a lot more plus they give you optimization help and Inktomi doesn't. Fast - Fast is a search engine like Inktomi. It shows up in Excite, WebCrawler, Lycos, Dogpile and more. The cost is $34 for the first url and $16 for each url after that. It guarantees you a listing for a year but doesn't guarantee a ranking. If you go with the submission service at Fast Easy Websites it includes Fast so don't get both. Alta Vista - Alta Vista gets a small percentage of visitors but I always list there because it's free. :-) Link Partners - Who's Good, Who's Bad The more sites that link to your site the higher your ranking in Google and some of the other search engines will be, but not all links are created equal. A link from DMOZ is a great link to get. Links from Free for All links pages are worthless. How do you know which links are good and which are bad? How do you go about finding sites to exchange links with? Read on. You want to exchange links with people that have a website on a topic that's related to what your website is about. Those are good links to get. Sometimes directories will just let you add your link and don't require a link back, but usually people will only put up your link on their site if you put their link on your site.Here's how I find sites where I can post my link: First, I look for directories because I don't have to link back on some of those. Let's say my website sells cookbooks. I might type in cookbooks add url or cookbooks submit site into Google and add my sites to the directories that come up. I add my link to all the sites I find there. I then create a links page on my site. Basically all this means is I set up a separate page on my site and name it links.htm or links.html. Whenever I come across a site that is on a related topic to mine that requires a reciprocal link, then I simply add them to my links page. How do I add them? Usually people that want to swap links will have their text and link already made for you which tells you what they want their link and description to say. You simply copy it into your website and link their title to their domain name. Note: If you've found this site helpful and want to link to it, I would appreciate it. You can find my link description info on the Link to Me page. Always make sure to put your link as the term that you want people to find you under in the search engines. For example, let's say that your site is about cookbooks. Your link title and description might be something like this: Cookbooks - appetizers, entrees, desserts and more.The link title is what gets linked so the term Cookbooks would be linked to your website. This helps with your search engine ranking because the spiders figure if other people are linking to you with the term "Cookbooks" then that must be what your site is about. Good Links vs. Bad Links If you exchange links with a site that Google doesn't like - maybe it got penalized for spamming or it did something else that Google considered bad - then your site could also get penalized. Even if you don't get penalized too, a link from a banned site won't help you at all. So, how do you tell if Google likes a site or not? It will tell you. There are two ways you can find out. 1. Type in the domain name of the site you are thinking about linking to in Google's search box. If it brings up a website listing then you know Google likes it. This doesn't work with sites that are new, but it will work with sites that have been around a while. If you don't see a listing in Google, send the website owner an e-mail and ask how long his site has been up. If they have been up for more than 2-3 months and they aren't in Google I wouldn't link with them. 2. You can download the Google toolbar from here. This will install a toolbar on the top of your browser and you can just glance at it and see a website's page rank. If the page rank bar shows green the site is listed in Google. While these may not technically be 'scams' I don't like these and I suggest you stay away from them: 1. Free for All Links services - these services tell you they will list your site on hundreds of thousands of web pages and tell you these links will help you. These links will not help you as Google and the other search engines ignore these links and all you will get is a BUNCH of spam for your trouble. Don't waste your time or money. Again, just do what I mention above and you will be fine. 2. Targeted E-mail lists - you will probably get lots of offers to send your ad to thousands of people via e-mail. No matter how much the people tell you the e-mail lists are safe and the people want your ad, don't believe them. It's spam plain and simple. If you use one of these lists, your web host will kick you off their servers, you could end up paying a fine and you will alienate a lot of people. Just don't do it. Regardless of which search engines you get listed in, you can increase your chances of getting a good ranking by optimizing your web pages. This is just a fancy way of saying that you need to tell the search engines what exactly is on your page. My favorite place is Self-Promotion. It's really good for beginners and explains things pretty well. It's free to use, but you can donate if you like. I suggest staying away from web sites that want you to pay them to optimize your web site for you. While some of these services aren't bad, most of the good ones are really expensive and a lot of the rest are complete rip-offs. Not only won't you get traffic, your site could end up banned from the search engines. You can spend just a bit of time and figure it out for yourself which can save you a whole lot of money. Do you want to make money from your website? Click here for some tips. -->
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