Branding & SEO dilemma for a Directory

Difficulty with SEO

[mack]

Hi people,
I have been working on a small scale web directory and search engine now for the past two and a half years. I am having problems getting my site ranked well in search engines simply because it is a search engine. How can a site built and operated from my bedroom compete with the likes of Google, AV, Ink etc etc etc. When I started building my site it was hosted on freespace and only really used by me to store sites that I visit regularly. Basicaly it was my start page where I had easy access to my points of interest on the web. Slowly I started to see a trickle of other users acces my site. I then moved it to a domain name with web hosting and tried to promote it. At this point in time I was young dumb (still dumb) and wanted to be the next Google so my directory was very general. This causes a problem now because it doesnt fit into any category as a mini portal or vortal, It is a general web search tool. Now I get about 1000 views a day but very few of my referals are to index page, they are all to internal pages within the directory. Main dificulty I face is how to promote the site, what would I optomise it as. Search engine??? how can I compete with the big boys with high PR and link pop. Where should I go now. What options are available.
If I could go back to the start I would have tried to create a category specific SE and directory. The only think I have that makes my site different to the rest is that all my content is family friendly, could this be classed as a niche???

Any advice gratefully received.

Help my site is dying :(
Site in profile

[john316]

You might want to clear up the branding issue..is it clickfor... or click4....

Makes it hard for anyone to "identify" with your site with that issue.

Be patient

Where are you looking for revenue?

PPC?
Sponsors?

Get focused.

People are paying for traffic, take a look over at Overture for ideas on markets.

[mack]

The branding is Clickfor but I bought the domain click4 simply because some people where linking back using click4 as the text for their link. I also use the click4 server to host my CGI etc.

What I am concidering doing is using java script to link from the clickfor server to the click4 server and alowing normal links for the return links. when the directory started I was using HTML to build the directory now I use a script but the clickfor host doesnt have faciliy to allow my scripts so I moved them to the click4 server... For an example all the directory category links lead to the other server... this is an seo nightmare.

[buckworks]

I just took a look and it's one of the slowest sites I've visited in quite a while. The pages seemed to take forever to load and there was a message "applet reloading" in the status bar. Is there something you can simplify behind the scenes? Finding ways to speed up your pages would improve the user experience, which of course would support everything else you're working towards.

There's two cents' worth from Canada!

[mack]

Anyone alse having the page load problems?

Just did a test on IE and opera..page loaded under 3 seconds...after deleting cache???