Re: Search engine question

> I have a buddy that is complaining that he only has 20 or so hits a day
> (he does custom painting, i.e. cars bikes, etc.), he is asking me to
> look into this Yahoo "pay for submission thing" to increase his hits as
> he makes his money at winter off the web site.
> Any views on this or suggestions would help, i've looked at his keyword
> list and seems ok.

There is more to promoting a website than just sitting back and waiting for
people to find it.

I've found some things that will improve hits aren't related to search
engines.  For a site that is focused on a particular field like your
friend's site, one really good way to increase hits is for him to
participate in discussions on email lists such as for cars or bikes, and
always sign his posts with his website address.  Same thing for forums.

On one of my personal sites I can get an increase of 2 or 300 hits in one
day just from one post to one busy list.  People love to click on web site
links, then they will often forward the link to others.

If a site is linked to from other sites it will increase hits plus improve
the standing in the search engines.  So, if your friend has some information
that others may find interesting and useful (along with his sales promos)
then others will link to it from their site.  It helps to give a little bit
of something for free to get people to buy what you have for sale.

Lots of people search for images, too.  Maybe your friend needs to be sure
that he has good images with alt tags and some description in the text so
they can easily be found in searches.  I would think in his line of work he
would have many images on the site.

My portfolio site at first only received maybe less than a 400 hits a month
by doing nothing at all.  I also raise dairy goats and developed some
animations on goats (which will later be developed into a CD for sale).
Just from participating on goat husbandry lists I've increased my hits to
over 1000 a day on a slow day.  Many hits come from search engine image
searches and almost an equal amount come from links from other sites.

I've never submitted the site to a search engine and certainly never paid
for a submission.

I have another site on which I sell our products and a CD training
simulation.  There are two free demos on the site.  That site regularly gets
over 5000 hits a day (one day last year it got a half million hits over two
days when Fark.com linked to it which was more trouble than it was worth)
and is first in all search engines hits for its keywords.  However, I
believe most of the traffic is due to my daily effort to get the site
address out there, then it sort of took off on it's own.

Karin Christensen
Scientific Illustration and Animation
http://www.imagecyte.com/

HWG hwg-techniques mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA