Forum Moderators: phranque
I will of course submit my site to the big search enginges, but then what do I do to reach my goal?
1. Start here [webmasterworld.com] (aka Brett's 12 month guide)
2. Find other resources in your niche and email them requesting they link to you. Make sure you have good content first. Have a look at the link development [webmasterworld.com] forum here for pointers.
3. Stick around, chat to other webmasters and generally read as much info on WW as possible. If you spend 10 minutes a day reading posts here, you'll know pretty much all you really need to know to get started in a couple of months. In 6 months time, I guarantee you will be replying to a pretty much identical post to your one here.
4. Have a realistic timescale for your goal. Don't expect instant results from from the SE's (especially Google).
It's become a slower process than ever before to get a new site up in the SERPS, but if your goals are realistic, you have good content and some good quality inbound links you will achieve your target.
TJ
Actually, I would say yes for google, no for yahoo and MSN - ranks for new domains don't take anywhere near as long there in my experience.
Also second the vote for Brett's thread. Then, read WebmasterWorld one hour a day every day. It will all come together. ;)
1000 hits a day is meaningless if they don't come back, and son't spend any money.
I've read almost every thread and every article on the Internet about marketing a website, and I've done pretty well with search engine position. My site is 2 years old, and it has gone from zero to 25,000 monthly visitors in 20 months. This was without spending one cent on any marketing. Below is my two cents on this topic:
1. Email. On your site, position a form to collect email addresses. You need to offer something concrete and valuable in order to convice people to sign up. If it is a foreclosure website, offer emails of the newest foreclosures.
2. Only send emails when you have something to say. I belong to several lists, and sometimes these guys email several times a day. I only send emails for important alerts, or other information that my audience will find valuable.
3. Treat every page on your site as its own website. Title, description, and keywords! Use them for every page.
4. Search engine terms. If you are not one of the big boys, don't go for the most obvious terms. If a law enforcement website, don't waste your time on "Police." Instead, try for "sergeant" or "law enforcement deaths" or "internal affairs."
5. Watch the news in your industry. If you see a new technique, issue, or anything coming up, quickly create a page on it with valuable information. If it is big enough, people will be searching for it.
6. Spam! Sorry guys, but it has helped me. Let me clarify... Using an email extraction program, I specifically search for email address of those in my niche audience. Maybe three or four times a year, I email them but only with a very relevant issue that I think they will find valuable. Also, I don't sell Viagra, and I'm not a fellow in Nigeria looking for assistance.
7. Message Boards. Find every message board in your niche. Become a regular poster. If you have something very important on your site (and only then), put up a respectful post with your link. Again, the info has to be valuable. Also, don't be afraid to use message boards of newspapers. Again, you need to have something valuable to say.
8. Put "milk" on your site. People visit stores every week to purchase milk. The stores know this, and they purposely put the milk in a rear corner of the store. It is the same thing with your website. Put something on there that will draw visitors back each day or week. What I do is post headlines to news stories of great importance to my niche. I update them every day without exception, and it brings people back. I also have a "Site of the Week" where I choose a website from my niche and write up a positive review on them. Many of them have put up links to me.
9. Link Exchange. Numeorus posts on this site on the importance of link exchange, so I won't go far into it. From my reading and experience, I have to conclude that page rank is most determined by how many sites point to you. I put a "Link Exchange" link on all my pages, and it gets me a new link per week.
10. I'm tired, so there is no number 10. Actually, let number 10 be, "Read as many threads on this site as you can!" The guys and girls on here are brilliant. They area also very nice, so pick their brains. Good night.
The easiest and most proven way of getting traffic is via search engines. You dont need to be a genius at seo. Simply get as many backlinks as possible to your website, the more you get, the higher you rank.
Antoine
1. Start here (aka Brett's 12 month guide)
Hmm, this is sort of a bad question. 1000 visitors a day means a lot of different things to different people.
But try getting 1000 people a day to visit a site about web hosting--I bet you won't be very successful.
It's about quality content. 1000 uniques is a piece of cake. True, it's easier on some subject than others, but still usually a piece of cake. And did I mention create good, quality "content"? ;)
I believe that with just one good inward link - and given time - quality content will automatically attract enough links to give you the traffic you desire. Using an enlightened link building strategy will hasten the process.
I believe that with just one good inward link - and given time - quality content will automatically attract enough links to give you the traffic you desire.
I couldn't DISAGREE more.
Oh yes, I degree thaqt the higher the quality of the content, the more likely it is that you will attract links.
BUT, one inward link just won't allow enough people to find the site to gain links.
A mediocre site that's easy to find will generate more links than the high quality site that is hard to find, and in the process that gap between the two will increase because Google only looks at links, it has no idea what your real quality is.
its a useful benchmark
BUT, one inward link just won't allow enough people to find the site to gain links.
Given scraper scum activity which is now at epidemic levels you'll have 20-100 links within a few days/weeks even before a webmaster comes along and recognises the good stuff he wants to link to. So, it is enough. But, it could be faster if, as I said, you work on a link building strategy.
Man, I'm tired of seeing people link to that guide.
I haven't seen a better guide for someone just starting out.
95% of it is still very relevant and, while keyword domain names are currently "in", long term that may not remain the case.
I got the impression from the original poster that he's looking at the long term, and for that I will stick by my pointing to that guide as good advice.
I agree with you about search engine submissions, it's not necessary anymore, but it won't do any harm.
TJ
1. SEO trumps quality, as evidenced by all the crap that shows up in the SERPs
2. I don't know how much "quality" a page can be if it's only added with an hour of work. A typical article in a newspaper represents one reporter's many hours of labor.
A typical article in a newspaper represents one reporter's many hours of labor.
We've just produced an article that costed us £4,500 (excluding labour) and took a total of 175 man hours. But then it wasn't produced for Adsense $ ;)
If someone adds several pages in an hour I would be a bit dubious about the quality of that content.
Don't put it online before you have a quality site to put online. It's worse to put a "nothing" site online, than no site at all. You want it flushed out from the start
BAD ADVICE. With Google's sandboxing of new sites, you want to let the site age a while. Putting up a complete site all at once just means it will sit there unvisited for many months.
The first thing you should do is get your homepage out there and put up links to it. Before building any content for the site or anything.
As for spam dominating the SERPS, yes I agree with that also. If you're looking for a short-term stint at the top, then spam rocks.
As does buying links.
But I wouldn't advise either of those to the original poster, assuming I am correct in thinking that he's looking for a long-term site success.
Wasn't there a thread somewhere updating Brett's 12 month guide in relation to current Google?
TJ
But I wouldn't advise either of those to the original poster, assuming I am correct in thinking that he's looking for a long-term site success.
I'm not sure it matters that much whether you are looking for short-term or long-term.
There are sites that succeed because in addition to quality they have a big advertising budget. There is one website whose ads I see on television everyday and they are probably achieving some level of success (but whether or not they make enough money to make up the cost of the ads is anyone's guess).
Most of the people who come to this site can't afford to advertise on TV, and even Adwords advertising is prohibitively expensive for most solo-webmastered sites. Peopla on this forum are looking for free traffic via search engines, which requires a different way of doing things than than the site that can afford to advertise.
You need links to get free search engine traffic, and the best links are gratis links, but to get those gratis links you need to come up in the search engines in the first place, and getting there in the first place requires SEO, and it may even require "black hat" SEO.
The mistake I made getting into this hobby (still a hobby for me) was trying to start out with a quality site. My advice, based on my own mistake, is to think small, try to start out with a less than grandios idea, just some site that could get a few hits a day and make some money with targetted traffic.
The lesson's learned from the small concept site will enable you to go back and do the quality site. What you don't want to do is waste a lot of time on a quality site that will never get any traffic because you didn't understand how to get traffic when you created the site.
On this basis you need only 33 pages for a 1000 a day, I find that most of my time goes into researching new terms BEFORE I even have a go at setting up a site.
