One of the biggest set back that most new site owners come across is getting people to visit they're newly created website. Whether you've paid for your site to be professionally created or you created it yourself, you'll find that after a month or so you are still not getting the amount of traffic you thought you'd get.
Sounds familiar?
Okay, so you've been told you need to submit your site to DMOZ, but because the directories are human edited this could take months. Submitting your sites to Search Engines, that's a good start, but normally it'll take a few months for your site to get spidered.
So, what should you do?
Here are a few tips to help generate traffic to your website while your waiting for the search engines to list it.
1. Join Webrings. A webring in general is a collection of websites from around the Internet joined together in a circular structure. When used to improve search engine rankings, webrings can be considered a search engine optimization technique.
To be a part of the webring, each site has a common navigation bar; it contains links to the previous and next site. By clicking next (or previous) repeatedly, the surfer will eventually reach the site they started at; this is the origin of the term webring. However, the click-through route around the ring is usually supplemented by a central site with links to all member-sites; this prevents the ring from breaking completely if a member site goes offline.
Webrings are usually organized around a specific theme, often educational or social. Web rings usually have a moderator who decides which pages to include in the web ring. After approval, webmasters add their pages to the ring by 'linking in' to the ring; this requires adding the necessary HTML.
Note: When adding the HTML code, make sure to have links load into a new window. This keeps your site open just in case your visitor wants to come back to it.
There are numerous webrings you can join. Here is a list you can check out.
Bravenet Site Ring Index
The Israeli WebRing
The Rail Trains
Ring Surf
alt-webring
Canonical Designs
The Cross Webring Ministries
Gunnar's Ringlink
iRing webbringar
The King's Rings
The Official World War II Online'™ Rings
perfext.com
Pets Corner
Red Oak Tree - Ring System
Rescuebreather.com Ringlink System
Ringlink.de
Turkish Media and Websites
Ringlink Webring Directory (rings hosted by Ringlink)
Ringsworld
WebRing.ws
Webringo
WebRing™
or you can even consider creating your own.
2. You can submit your site to Top Sites. Top site lists are a simple, but powerful system for driving tons of targeted traffic to your website. You join a Top Site and put a code of HTML on your site. Then when visitors come to your site, they click on it to vote for your site. The more votes you get the higher your site will move up in the list. Of course you need to make sure you get traffic to your site and advertise it or tell all of your friends and family to vote for your site.
Here is a list of sites that you can join to submit your site to.
Top Site List
123 Rank
Ultimate Top Sites
Note: Make sure to join a Top Site that will provide quality link back to your site. Meaning, you should join a Top Site that is used for sites that contain similar content.
3. Join Online Groups or Virtual Communities. A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as letters, telephone, email or Usenet rather than face to face. If the mechanism is a computer network, it is called an online community. Virtual and online communities have also become a supplemental form of communication between people who know each other primarily in real life or become friends offline because of this connection.
There are usually rules to posting within each type of community. Your introduction if written properly to include your website, will generate curiosity from existing members.
Note: Your Signature line should be customized to include your website URL.
One of the biggest Online Community provider is Yahoo Groups and you might as well take advantage of Google Groups while you're at it.
If you never post anything else after you've joined the groups, it is imperative that you post your introduction when you sign up.
Warning: Joining Groups can be very addicting!
4. Join SocialNetworks.Social networking is a phenomena defined by linking people to each other in some way. Generally, social networks are used to allow or encourage various types of activity whether commercial, social or some combination of the the two.
Joining a Social Network can also help provide business connections and leads to other businesses. Many such as Ryze and AdlandPro have forums or groups that you can join. You can find a list of Social Networking Websites here
Creating your site presence is one thing, getting others to know of its existence takes a little work. If you join even a few of the sites I've mentioned, you will soon start getting traffic to your site. The best part . . . they are all free forms of advertising.
