[D.J.]

Could any of you recommend the best way to advertise a website. I have been looking into this and have found a couple of places that will do it, but I would really like some second opinions from the guys in the know :P Thank you
D.J.
West Coast Custom Tackle

[Delw]

D.J

There are a few ways.
make sure your website is completed then fill out every submit ( from places like yahoo google altivista etc) form you can( I found out about this late)

Also in all your webpages make sure you run meta tags ( look it up on yahoo lots of good info.

have your friends goto a search engine and do a search for your website. whne they find it click it and let it open the page.( this is what meta tags are good for)

Lastly post on as many boards as you can and leave your website on you tag line. Ubb boards and vbulletin boards are the best(board software) the phpbb and the other newer free boards dont work with search engines as well. Also if you can dont use post nuke on your page, if you do make sure you add meta tags to all your post nuke pages.
Post nuke doesnt work well at all with search engine robots.
I use post nuke on my main page, and it doesnt works as good as a regular html page.
Also oc shopping cart has the same problem. I believe it has to do with the way they do there .php coding.
I had this other shopping cart that with in 3 months my website was all over the search engines and I didnt even sumit them.
I still can find my items on that shopping cart in yahoo cache search pages.

Best advise is to read many differnt articles on meta tags, almost every author has a different opinion on them.



Delw

[D.J.]

Thanks for the info Delw. I appreciate it :P

[stevec]

As someone who optimizes websites for people daily, here's a couple helpful hints that will help you get yourself on google and yahoo search engines.

Your meta tags are important as they tell what you have on your site, such as a description tag, keyword tag, robot tag and revisit tag. Yahoo places a lot of importance on these, and google places a lot of importance on title tag and what they call PageRank (PR). PageRank in general is a rating of your webpage from the amount of quality inbound links coming from other sites. Quality being the keyword. Each page is given a ranking, 0-10, and the higher your ranking, the better your results on google. An inbound link from a PR 1 to your site is a negative, while an inbound link from a PR 3 is a decent link. Having good quality text, LIVE TEXT, no graphics as text, and having links to other pages that are live text are also a good idea in your main text field.

From there, paying 30 bucks or so, to have your site found within 48-72 hours is something that I would suggest, as yahoo and google could take up to 1-3 months to index your homepage.

I also suggest finding and exchanging links each week, sit down for one hour and find people who are interested in exchanging links with you, that are in your general field and emailing them with your information. I have a list when I do a site that will exchange links with me, all high PR sites, but normally can only get 5-10 inbound links per hour. I go back a forth and check PR before asking/exchanging links with someone.

This is probably very confusing, and I apologize, I have been learning it for more than a year, some with HUGE fantastic results, and other that have ben so-so. It depends on how much competition you have. Most of the sites that I do for guides I have great results, so if you need some more help, please email me.

Tight lines and screaming reels,
sc
steve@stevecgraphics.com
http://www.mosquitolagoonguides.com

[findthefish]

While optimizing your web site for the search engines is definitely a good idea, getting a top ranking is not always easy and often takes a lot of time and effort. For keywords which have a tremendous amount of competition, it can be a very daunting task, even for the professional. That is not to say that you should not have your web site optimized. That should be an ongoing process. However there is a much faster way to get traffic and that is by using Google Adwords and Overture PPC (for Yahoo and other search engines).

With these programs, you basically place an ad (called a sponsored link), select your keywords, and establish your budget. Then when someone searches for one of your keywords, your ad appears at the top of the page on the right. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay a small fee. This fee depends on the popularity of the keyword and what you have authorized in your budget. It can be as low as $.05 a click. Most of the fishing sites that we manage pay between $.30 and $.45 per click.

While this may sound like a lot, it really is one of the cheapest ways of getting traffic - and it is qualified traffic. Some of our sites have budgets of up to $200 per month (during their peak seasons) and they get most of their new business from these ads. Others have budgets of $25.00 per month. It just depends of the size of the operation and how much business you are after.

One great thing about this is that you can place your ad and have it appearing within the hour. No delays.

For more information you can go to Google's web site and click on advertising.

This is something you can do yourself, but a little guidance can go a long way in producing a cost effective ad.