Getting the name out there!

[Ennis]

Ok I was wondering about getting my site advertised, its a forum so I am limited with putting search engine tags in or anything that involves chaging the websites code, so I was wondering if anybody has any tips for attracting people to your site?

www.talkphilosophy.tk

[pwaring]

To be honest, I don't think search engine tags have that much of an effect anymore. I haven't been using them on any of my sites yet Google gets to them fairly quickly (they're usually completely crawled within a month) and the other search engines tend to follow suit a bit later.

The best way to get people coming to your site is to have some content that's worthwhile reading. You'll find that someone will come across it on a Google search or the like and then link to it, causing more people to come and visit (this has been the case with my tutorials/articles anyway). The other way to get visitors is post on web development boards asking for a review of your site and some people will probably check it out.

[hiddeninclouds]

One thing that i've done is sell shirts with my URL on them, I don't make a profit, but i'm happy to say that people out there sport shirts w/ things i've said while drunk on the front and my URL on the back. It has made a difference, once a friend and i went out to lunch and everyone in the dinner was staring at her shirt

[pwaring]

Aye, t-shirts can work well if you have a simple URL and a good slogan on them. Works even better if you can get some drop-dead gorgeous women wearing them.

[unit321]

you can get free traffic. Ive only found a few good ones. My favorite one is trafficswarm. www.trafficswarm.com you have to work, but its fun+easy. I didnt give you my referral link, cuz thats lame. Word of mouth is the best, submit to search engines once or twice. Do some link exchanges. The BEST way is to spend money on advertising. Its like ten cents per 1000 clicks, easy. Hope this helped,
unit321

[sun7dots]

Pwaring is right. Most important is content. (and the t-shirts on beautiful girls could help too)

Other things you can do:

Have clean code using css. Use tags as h1, h2... Do not use table design - google and other search engines likes sites where they can find big ratio of text. Much better is something like <div id='content'>content... than <table><tr><td><tr><td><tr><td>content...

btw. You can get your content size using this favlet:

javascript:void(open('http://www.holovaty.com/tools/getcontentsize/?url='+escape(document.location)))

(without that space in javascript)

Use mod_rewrite to have nice urls. Much better is url like something.com/this-is-nice-url than something.com?id=25478asd895. But I don't think, you can do this at .tk domain.

Get links to you site. Google pays big attention to how much your page is linked. Good back link can help very much.

And! Have good readable content.

[pwaring]

Originally posted here by unit321
you can get free traffic. Ive only found a few good ones. My favorite one is trafficswarm. www.trafficswarm.com you have to work, but its fun+easy.

Those sites rarely work, you get loads of hits but no-one actually reads your site or signs up for anything. The only people who make money/traffic are the ones running the scheme and the first few people to sign up.

If you want to spend money textads on kuro5hin.org did me quite well a while back - $10/10000 impressions I think it cost me.

[strandedthinker]

Best way: Link others and have them link you.

[Ennis]

Ok thanks everyone, I'll give everything a go.

[adiz]

I have actually been looking into the advertising side of the internet. There are alot of place you can pay for it but to get your name listed with out paying is alittle more difficult. Here are a few things I have found to make the process easier.

1. Meta-Tags (vary the tags per page) remember to be careful when using these you do not want to get blacklisted on certain engines because of blackhat SEO techniques.

2. Register with the engines (especially DMOZ)

3. Get a well written paragraph on the index page if you have a very descriptive paragraph that really describes the company and uses the words that you would like to be indexed by.

4. Linking - linking maybe among the most important function in become index with good ranking. However, engines like google will often look at the quality of the links.

5. Images - if you give you images good desciptive filenames and also good tags with good description words it will help in the rankings.

6. Setting up a mini search engine on your site will also help in getting your ranking towards the top with the search engine it will make you site more useful therfore higher rankings.

There are alot more SEO techniques but here are some of ones I quickly thought of.

- Adiz