“I’m writing lots of free content for my website, but still nobody comes. What can I do?”

Having launched more than 100 specialist content websites for clients over the last six months, I often get asked this question. My answer is always twofold.

Over the long term, which I suggest is 12 to 24 months, good-quality, highly focused and regularly updated content websites will triumph.

Google and the search engines are getting far better at separating the wheat from the chaff. They are 100% focused on finding the best content for each particular search request.

Once the search engines have visited your site and made an initial positive assessment, they will keep coming back and re-indexing your content. The more content you publish, the more frequently they will return. The more they like what they see, the higher they will rank you on the search results pages. The higher up the results list you appear, the more people will see your links and click on them. Hopefully, some of these visitors like what they read so much that they link to it from their websites or blogs. These inbound links from other sites are seen as positive endorsements of your content by the search engines, which respond by improving your site’s position on the search results pages.

And so the virtuous circle goes on and the traffic to your website increases.

The moral of this story is: keep publishing great content and don’t give up just because you don’t see instant results.

But this all takes time. Read more »

Get Your Website Launched!
There are many elements in a website design project. Elements may include the overall strategy, the site map, site contents, design, coding, search engine optimization (SEO) and additional functionality. With so much to track, it’s easy to let the website design project roll on forever. It’s tempting to keep tinkering and adjusting the various components until they’re perfect. But you should remember that while you’re editing the website, it stays on your designer’s temporary server for testing or on your desktop – and never gets launched.

This is counter-productive.
Read more »

I have been taking online to some of my colleagues recently and they keep asking the same question, about how to get started online at minimum cost and how to avoid scams. This weekend my friend Gary H, who gave me a fantastic header for one of my blogs, asked me the same question once more. This is what he said:

“I have to start my endeavours over again. I was starting to work with lunarpages and I think it an easy site. I moved into a deluxe condo. I want to utilize it as a business opportunity. Maybe a social networking site; maybe a recommendation of local businesses to outfit their new condo. I do have some ideas of my own to enterprise online. I viewed your sites and they look awesome…but ..who do I trust.. how do I choose? Could you narrow the choices to 3? I work full time but can work at projects evenings and weekends.”

That is a tall order, Gary, but I will do my best. Read more »

I am planning to move an exisiting Blogger blog to this site on its own domain. The Blog has page rank 3 and this site has yet to gain page rank. Many website owners are in a similar position and are afraid of the risks involved. To hear how to make the switch successfully, tune in to WebProNews and hear what Google’s Vanessa Fox had to say at the SES conference in New York 2007.

We recently registered a new domain name for Kevin the Collie’s website, after it had been establishing itself through a subdomain for several months. Looking back, it would have been better to register a domain from the start, but initially we thought the site was just going to be a hobby. Work went into his blog on dog training as well, and that has a good readership. At the end of last year I saw an offer for free domain names with no tie-in from a UK domain registrar – I am not going to name them, I don’t want them to benefit from the backlink.
Of course I took it, hoping to save some cash. Big mistake! I could not get the domains moved to my web hosting company DNS servers. I have done this before with other domains from other registrars so I know I was following the instructions. Despite numerous help tickets being raised with the Help Desk the action was aborting every time. In the end I simply left the for the 60 day period to pass, after which I moved them to my usual domain name registrar. To move the domains I had to pay their usual fee, so in the end I saved nothing and got loads of hassle in the process. The moral is: free domains are never worthwhile. For $8 you can avoid all this hassle and start establishing the website from day one.

If you need help to get more free traffic to your site or blog, read the latest Internet Business Tips eZine for the best internet marketing ideas. You do not need a huge pay per click budget – use these ideas first to make money from your site.

If you need more traffic to your web site or blog – and you can never have too many targeted visitors – here are some free ideas that you can use today, at no cost, to attract interested visitors to your website or blog. There are a number of creative ways of getting free web traffic from the search engines, find out how.

If you need more website traffic – you can never have too many targeted visitors – here are some ideas that you can use today, at no cost, to get interested visitors to your website or blog.