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promoting websites


boemba

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I hope this is an appropriate topic.

How do some of you go about promoting your website. My experience is as follows:

I tried to submit my sites to search engines. I never had the impression this had any result, although it cost me a lot a time providing all kinds of data they ask for. Some might be OK, I guess but you have to pay heavily for it. Any suggestions as to search engines that are useful?

Is there any local Bangkok site that arranges banner exchanges or something similar. I do not think it is useful to exchange banners with US companies etc., because my sites have mainly local content.

Any comments welcome, I guess it could also help other people.

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Hi Boemba

My site gets about 200-400 hits per day and I've been lucky in that people who have liked Bangkokmouth have very kindly put a link to it on their site.

One thing that many people believe is that once you get on Yahoo listings your prayers are answered - that's utter rubbish!! I've get excellent Yahoo/Google listings and I get very little traffic from those sources. And when they do come, they are looking for 'naked ladyboys' and 'pics of bargirls'. My site doesn't cater to that, so invariably they view one page and then are gone.

My 'multi-page' viewing traffic comes from very unlikely sources actually. A guy in Denmark put a link to my site as did a guy in Spain - I get a lot of visitors from both. Also Thaistudents.com did a feature on my site and most people who enter from that will often view 6 or more pages.

At the moment 50% of my total traffic is repeat visitor. One of the reasons I don't get more visitors is that I don't have a discussion board, but there's no sadder site than a discussion board that gets about 2 posts a day, and I fear that would be the case.

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Hi boemba:

I agree with Phil. Yahoo isnt all that.

Yes. It takes alot of your time to submit your site each month. But if they see it submitted enough and enough people are entering it into their search engines, it just might make it in.

I dont know what kind of meter you have on it, but here is one to consider: www.sitemeter.com this has many good features to keep track of you traffic.

Troy

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Hi,

Building traffic takes time. When I first put this site online (Sep '96), I got about 15 visitors a week! It slowly increased though when word got out.

Submitting to the search engines is important (make sure you have optimized your pages though), but links are probably even more important.

Anyway, I guess what I am trying to say is be patient and don't expect hunderds of hits overnight.

Sanuk!

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Quality content along with regular updates and readers will return. Agree with Phil about the search engine referrals. I get less than 10% of my hits from search engines.

Also agree that a discussion board is not the way to go as it skews your hits and unless you have a fairly good counter/tracker installed, you have to wonder how many people check out your site from the board, and how many for the site itself.

Stick

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A lot of search engines - particulary Google - work on link popularity, meaning the more pages that have links to you, the higher you will rank in the search engines. So getting links from other, relevant, sites is very important - write to other website owners and offer to swap (it will do both of you a favour), and submit to any relevant search engines and directories. Don't waste time submitting to hundreds, it's likely all your traffic will come from the major ones - Google, Lycos, Altavista, Yahoo, Dmoz - so those are the ones to concentrate on.

You have to target your pages too, think about what you want people to type into the search engines to find you. You've no chance of getting a good listing under 'Bangkok' because there's so much competition, but have a good chance with 'Bangkok bar prices'. This is a sensible approach too, as it means the visitors you do get will be actually looking for the information you have to offer. So put 'Bangkok bar prices' in your page title, meta tags, and several times in the page text itself. This is probably why Bangkok Phil doesn't get such good search engine results - each page has so many topics, what would you type into a search engine to find it ?

Link text is also important - "Click here for Bangkok bar prices" is much better than "Click here for Bangkok bar prices."

Also, remember that you can write the same webpage several different ways and it can affect your ranking. If you've got loads of Javascript or CSS at the top of your page, it pushes the real text down the page and makes it look less 'important' to the search engines. It's not too hard to rewrite it so the actual text is much higher up the page.

Good luck.

[ July 29, 2001: Message edited by: Iaxia ]

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I've actually had people enter my website from a search engine by typing in 'carpet dealers in Delhi' and - you're gonna like this - 'Micheal Owen's naked arse'.

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Hi,

"Quality content along with regular updates and readers will return."

Agree.

"Agree with Phil about the search engine referrals. I get less than 10% of my hits from search engines."

Not too sure about this. I too get about 10% of my hits from search engines, but 60+% is from bookmarks. So how much of my *new* visitors are coming through search engines? I think this may easily be 30-40%, and that is a rather significant number.

"Also agree that a discussion board is not the way to go as it skews your hits and unless you have a fairly good counter/tracker installed, you have to wonder how many people check out your site from the board, and how many for the site itself."

The end result is though that people visit your site, and keep doing so. Whether or not they only read the board or the site as well, they remember your site's name.

After starting a message board, my visitor count shut up by ~300% in 2 months. I'd say that is worth it, certainly if you are selling something.

Sanuk!

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The few hits / visitors I get are mostly from "spamming" on this site (thanks Marcel)and a few posts at the weekend on Looney Planet.

I haven't bothered about exchanging Links with anyone as to be honest an average of about one E-mail a day from visitors is all I can be bothered with.......and even then I can be a slowwwwww responder!

Long ago I did submit the site to a few search engines - I had no idea what I was doing and no doubt I haven't "optimised" my listing nor have I bothered resubmitting the site since, which may acccount for the average of about 1 visitor a month from ALL of them!

The good / bad news is that Homestead will be charging to host my site from the end of September. I keep changing my mind about keeping the site going, it's not so much the money to get the site hosted as a "proper" dot.com, just that the novelty has worn off and I can't really see the purpose (from my point of view) of continuing or how I could make any money off it.

This is also my excuse for not having up revamped it.

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quote:

Originally posted by David_66_UK:

QB]

I hope you are looking into the new .info domain names that soon will be available(you can preregister). Personally I think there is no escaping having a proper domain name. I think the search engines look for this first. I know a few badly made websites with high traffic, just because they have a good looking name, with thailand, thai etc. mentioned in the domain name.

[ July 31, 2001: Message edited by: boemba ]

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