Free Attract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald Page A

like-minded sites.
    This step is all about building community. Contrary to what you might expect, this sort of small-scale, word-of-mouth promotion might bring more traffic to your site than high-powered search engines like Google.
    4. Perfect your site’s meta elements.
    Meta elements contain hidden words that convey important information about your site’s content, like a site description. Search engines use them as one way to determine what your website’s all about. For details, see below.
    5. Submit your website to Internet directories.
    Like search engines, directories help visitors find websites. The difference between directories and search engines is that directories are generally smaller catalogs put together by humans, rather than huge sprawling text indexes amassed by computers.
    6. Submit your website to Internet search engines.
    Now you’re ready for the big time. Once you submit your website to web heavyweights like Google and Yahoo, it officially enters the public eye. However, it takes time to climb up the rankings and get spotted.
    7. Figure out what happened.
    To assess the successes and failures of your strategy, you need to measure some vital statistics—how many people visit your site, how long they’re staying, and how many visitors come back for more. To take stock, you need to crack open tools like hit counters and server logs.
    Throughout this book, you’ll tackle these steps, get some new ideas, and build up a collection of promotion strategies.
    Spreading the Word
    Some of the most effective promotion you can do doesn’t involve any high-tech XHTML wonkery, but instead amounts to variations on the theme of good old-fashioned advertising.
    The first step is to find other websites like yours. If you create a topic-oriented site—your musings on, say, golf, fine jewelry, or jeweled golf clubs—similar sites make up your virtual neighborhood. They’re part of a larger online community to which you now belong. So why not introduce yourself? Strike up a reciprocal link relationship (see the next section).
    On the other hand, if you’re creating a business site, similar sites are, obviously, your competitors. As a result, you’re unlikely to share links. However, it’s a great idea to Google your competition. You’ll probably find service sites—business directories, news sites, content sites, and so on—that link to these competitors. Once you find these service sites, you can publicize your site there as well.
    Reciprocal Links
    A reciprocal link is a link-trading agreement. The concept is simple. You find a website with similar content and strike a bargain: Link to my site, and I’ll link to yours. Reciprocal links are an important thread in the underlying fabric of the Web. If you’re not sure where to start searching for potential link buddies, pay a visit to Google and use the link : operator (as explained in Figure 1-1 ) to see who’s linking to sites similar to yours. (You can get an even more powerful link viewer as part of the Google Webmaster Tools, described in “Google AdWords” , below.)
    Reciprocal links only work if there’s a logical connection between the two sites. For example, if you create the website http://www.ChocolateSculptures.com/ , it probably makes sense to exchange links with http://www.101ChocolateRecipes.com/ . But http://www.HomerSimpsonForPresident.com/ is a far stretch, no matter how much traffic it gets.
    Topic isn’t the only consideration in link exchanges. You should also look for sites that feel professional. If a similarly themed site is choked with ads, barren of content, formatted with fuchsia text on a black background, and was last updated circa 1998, keep
looking.
    Once you find a site you want to exchange links with, dig around on the site for the webmaster’s email address. Send a message explaining that you love http://www.101ChocolateRecipes.com/ , and plan to link to it from your site, http://www.ChocolateSculptures.com/ . Then,