Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I've got a content site that provides articles, ideas, polls, etc. around a certain topic.
The topic is very popular, but the main websites that dominate the SERPS are ugly, out of date, spammy, etc.
My site is clean, attractive (IMO), simple to use and offers what I think is good content.
I'm sandboxed in Google, not well favoured from Y!, but trickle fed from MSN. I have an RSS feed that is read and subscribed to by quite a few people on My Yahoo! and around the web.
I guess that I get approx. 30 - 40 visitors a day via search engines and the few links I've managed to get. My Urchin stats show approx. 130 visitors a day (which accounts for feed subscribers, spiders, etc)
The site has been up for around 5 months but as far as I know no-one has linked to my content.
What can I do to 'shout' about what I have to offer?
Getting a link, or link exchange, from any of the big sites is a no-hope, and all the smaller sites make you add them to your links page first and then never bother to link back.
It's so frustrating! Any ideas people?
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:26 pm (utc) on Nov. 16, 2005]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]
>> The site has been up for around 5 months
Problem 2. The older the site the more likely I find it is to get natural links. Maybe it's the 1999 look. Maybe they check WHOIS. But age does matter.
>> My site is clean, attractive (IMO), simple to use and offers what I think is good content.
Problem 3. Those are all good factors and help with links but... winning the linking game is more like winning a popularity contest than winning an achievement award. People link because they like you. Logically it should always be because of your good content, your W3C validation, your easy-accessibility design... things like that. But, people don't link to Britney Spears' sites for their cool table-less CSS design.
Freq---
Changing your nic might help.
Hmmmm - yup, ok. I knew I should have picked viagra-cialis-xanax as my nick. :-)
If you had a really useful site in Georgian architecture you're more likely to get those natural links.
Great point - I guess the scarcer the 'topic' the better. My topic is pretty huge, but the amount of quality content around is poor.
Spend some money on Adwords.
On a side note, I popped the equivalent of my RSS feed onto Google Base today and I've had more traffic from Google today than I have since the site started, so that's a plus.
I would have stickied you but I'm betting your box is full. ;)
Freq---
Presumably returning visitors means they like my site.
I still get no natural links.
I think AdWords is a good way of getting some branding and building an audience one member at a time. It takes a lot longer than five months to reach a critical mass, much more before people start throwing links at you.
Frequent's advice to site target more established sites is a good idea. At twenty five cents per cpm, it can't get any cheaper. I created banners for one of my forums and regularly show it at competing forums so that people likely to enjoy my site will gain an awareness of it.
Then there's AdBrite. Another excellent way to obtain cheap traffic. Sometimes you just have to throw money at it. I picked up a DMOZ listing on one site within a week of advertising it- that doesn't happen all the time, but it happens.
It might seem like a black hole, but it isn't necessarily. It may just be having to get used to the idea of advertising.
