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| Building A High Traffic Web Site | ||||||
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FINDING A WEB HOST Now first you need to decide if you want to put up money up front. If so, then you'd be better off investing in a name as soon as you can and register it. In our case, we registered skiingworld.net and let me tell you now that many DOT-com's are taken. At least without making your name too long to remember or too hard to remember. So, you want to be creative and avoid using numbers like money4u. There is a huge deficit in address names, people and corporations are willing to spend literally millions to buy them. If your like us and want to start small for a test run there are plenty of free web space services out there. But be forewarned, that if your selling a product or program you will need to buy a domain for credibility. For the free web spaces look for the ones that give you the smallest sub-domains such as the one we use here. http://www.free-web-space-inc.com/ . Avoid redirection services because most search engines will not index a site thats been redirected. SETTING UP YOUR SITE Now, once you have picked your host it's time to set up your site. So far we have found that Microsoft FrontPage to be very easy to use. If you don't have FrontPage, you might consider buying it or you can use a number of different html editors that are available for free or have trial downloads. How you present your site is something that many books have been written about. A great site which is packed with FREE infromation about what makes a good site is http://sitepoint.selfpromotion.com/. If you don't do anything else read this entire site. Now at this point, you can have the greatest site in the world but if no-one comes to see it then it's worthless. We have sent this site to be indexed to just about every search engine that doesn't require a fee. Here, we have set up a different theme with each page. We are going to be keeping track of each one and to see what you like. Our opinion is less is more. Or more info less dazzle. More good links less flashing and dancing banners. We believe that there is a time and place for everything. This isn't the time for flash. We could be proven wrong though so we will continue to investigate. Starting with the META tags You want to start with a list of words that you expect people to type in that will find you. After describing your site in the description tag move on to the keyword tag. Now it seems search engines are touchy. On our http://skiingworld.deep-ice.com site we used as many skiing related keywords we could think of. Later using a meta checker we were told that we used the word skiing too many times and it could be considered spamming by the search engines. So we trimmed it down. Unfortunately, traffic for winter sports sites declines to a trickle during the summer so it is a bad site to use as a gauge now. So we will use this site as an example. We find this important to mention briefly now. We read an interesting article about keywords. This author believed that by using the most commonly typed in words along with the keywords that are relevant to your site that it would bring that many more people. Now we all know that the most commonly typed in words have to do with sex. So, in our case he suggested using the description title like this ... A HOT FREE SEXY site for all FREE information on AMATURE home businesses and the NAKED truth about internet marketing. An ENDOWED essay on the ways to get your site promoted. Three Things that will always sell, health, wealth and SEX. We will be updating what we find with that more later. SITE PROMOTION Well, after a week of submittals to FAA's at SUPER PROMO we have received so many emails from other advertisers in return but have gotten very few visits to this site. In fact, we were getting so many that we were just deleting them and had to apply for removal. Now SUPER PROMO seems to be a good idea however, if people are deleting them it is no good. Also on SUPER PROMO's behalf they did remove us in a timely manner. Now we have also become a member with CLICKERS and have spent a number of hours surfing with them. We have accured 8589 points. Their statistics page has always said LOW SUBSCRIPTION ALERT causing us to believe we aren't surfing enough. It also says he have had 22 clicks on our banner in the surf bar. We would say up to this point, CLICKERS needs to be investigated further. There are many different types of promotional ideas that you need to really read all of them. We would suggest going through the tutorial they offer. UPDATING 8/14/01 Our traffic has increased slightly from 0-1 hits a day to 3-5 hits a day. After we have investigated CLICKERS a little further and have learned to utilize their site it seems to have helped. At least up to this point we have been happy with CLICKERS. 8/22/01 One other aspect to each page is that you should minimize it's length. People get bored quickly. So, for a continued lesson on our progress you should check out our journal page.
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