Forum Moderators: phranque
There realy is no easy answer to this. the first thing you should do is to try and make your site as usefull and user friendly as possible. Try and have your homepage within 2 clicks of each page in your site.
If a user finds your site and has a bed experience, they will not return. Try and use keywords within the body pf your pages but do not use them so often that is does not read well. You should also use "mets tags" these are tags that are read by the search engines to index your page. These should be included in the head section of the page. You should use "description" "keywords" "title" meta tags. Some engines use one or more and some do nou use them at all but it is always good to have them there.
The next thing you should do is to try and work on your link popularity. Try contacting webmasters with similar content and suggest a link swap... there realy is no easy way to do this ...just de polite and explain the benefits and with any luck they will agree. If someone agrees to link to you always remember and return the link...lol
now that you have links pointing at your site searchengine spiders will begin to index your site. try and ket them find you rather than suggesting it to the spider. if a spider finds your site ... it will know it came from a site with similar content, This can help you with page rank and se ranking. What i find is that once a site is in the index it usualy takes about 2-3 updates before you see good rankings. Bear with it and dont get downhearted. If you optomize your page and do not abuse the search engine rules you will see results. You should also try and get listed in the main directories such as yahoo and dmoz. they help out big time when it comes to page rank due to the fact that the link was found from a very powerfull source. Getting listed ina directory is never easy and can take qute a long time....do not continualy submit....try and submit only every 8 weeks or soo so as not to get acused of spamming.
I hope this was of some use to you...and all the best.
Unless it's an adult site; then maybe they want a bed experience.;) <sorry>
To get back to the topic... As far as getting your site visible, Mack gave a good summary. Hang out here reading these boards for a while, and you'll learn a lot.
What makes a site interesting depends on your audience, your theme, what your site is about. Know your audience. I think a lot of people like to see related links. So if your site is about hunting dogs, you could have links pointing to other sites about other other types of dogs, or dog-sledding, or even cats. That way you begin to establish your site as part of a community.
It may be easier to say what turns people off or makes a site boring. It's probably generally true that huge slow-loading graphics are a turn-off (unless you're expecting them and have some text on the page to read while the pic is downloading). For me, I hate animated gifs, and sound is a real turn-off. I'm not too impressed with flash either. I hate sites that take forever to load while displaying a button that says "click here to skip intro". Instead, why not get right to the chase, and have a button that says, "click here to see flash intro if you've nothing better to do".
It was a typo... we all make them :)
