Ok, So you built your site and probably submitted it into a site competition area but you're not getting very many votes because you're not getting that many hits to your site. Some places online claims that if you build your website, people will come. I have to say that is completely false. You have to advertise. You have to let your site be known!
I been asked a lot of questions from people who joined Fantasy Gathering's Top Sites on how to increase traffic to their site in hopes of getting more votes. So I compiled a list to help everyone!
Meta Tags
Meta tags are usually found between the head tags. They are hidden and meant for search engines to find when someone puts in a search word. Visit one of these sites that will tell you about meta tags and how to put some into your pages.
Create Meta Tags
Learn to create Meta Tags - A Promotion Guide
Meta Tag Generator
Download a Meta Tag Generator! - Quite frankly, This is a good program!
Search Engines
I'm sure every one of you know what a search engine is! Yahoo and Altavista are good examples of what a search engine is. Even though you might not rank #1 when someone puts a search word in, it is still wise to try to get listed just in case someone will come along to your site!
Add Me! - Submit your site to 25 search engines.
AutoSubmit - Submit your site to 20 search engines.
Submit Blaster - No idea how many, It doesn't state.
SubmitMart - 25,000 "free" places to promote your website.
Signatures
Do you post on message boards or send e-mail often? One of the greatest things is that you should put your url down. For example:
~Kyrsanth
Fantasy Gathering
I post often at messageboards and I can honestly tell you that putting your url in your signature will help you get more hits of people browsing through.
FFA Links
FFA stands for Free-For-All. Quite frankly, I don't think this type of thing works. If you ever take this route, heed my advice! Create a new e-mail at Yahoo or Hotmail that you never plan to use again. That way, all the spam is sidetracked and you won't suffer with it in your main e-mail!
From what I was told, FFA works like this. When you submit your url to an FFA page, your link shows up on their page. Wonderful, right? Well, Chances are, you were asked for your valid e-mail or it wouldn't work. You'd get a confirmation e-mail with an ad stashed in it. But if you were the owner of an FFA page and 500 people submitted their link to your FFA page, your ad went out to 500 people if they even bothered to read your e-mail.
FFA NET - You can submit your url to the entire network for free and register to get your own FFA link page. To test it out, I had registered one for Fantasy Gathering. Click on the link to view the FFA page.
Link Exchanges
Almost every website you see has a link page. Take advantage of it! Put a little section at the top of your link page saying, "Do you want to exchange links? E-mail me!". The more links you add to your page, the more that people are linking back to you. This is an easy way to increase hits!
There are more things you can do and sometimes it will cost money. A lot. It's just a risk you take. People think that when they make homepage and finish it, that there is nothing more to do. You got another think coming! ::laughs:: It doesn't end there, The work keeps going.
I hope this helped many people.