How to promote a site efficiently??? 1

[Sleidia]

Hello,

I've recently created a web based service allowing people to help each other thanks to the use of an integrated reward delivery system. But whatever I do to make it become popular, it won't catch on.

That's why I'm here to ask the fellow members of this forum to have a look at that site and to share their opinion about the possible reason of this lack of popularity.

Secondly, feel free to share wour views on some nice methods to promote such a service without the use of agressive marketing tools (like spam, forums invasions, etc...) which I hate a lot.

Lastly, you can contact me if you are open to a link exchange between your site and mine.

Anyway, here is the URL:

http://www.helpbooster.com

Thanks a lot to those who will participate

 

[CoreyBryant]

I would make one change on the main page. You have Needs ........ Help ........ Support, etc. And then [English ] [ Français ] [ Japanese ] on there. What are the hyperlinks? Since you have needs at the top, one would think that is a hyperlink. Either underline the hyperlinks so your user will know what is a hyperlink.

You can use these:

http://www.website-promotion-ranking-services.com/submitit/sitesubmitter.cgi

http://www.sitesolutions.com/

http://www.simplesubmit.com/cgi-bin/submit.cgi

There is alos a lot of information that can be found here:

http://searchengineforums.com/

- good ideas, tips, tricks as well. If you also know someone who is listed at yahoo, see if they will put a link from their site to you to help with spidering. Speaking of that, make sure you have a robots.txt in your web:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

or

http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

Mak sure that you repeat your keywros in all three: META Keywords, META Description, & title. Make sure these keywords also appear in the body of your web pages as well. Make sure that all your web pages are linked within three levels deep (preferably two). And submit your site to

http://dmoz.org

Also get rid of this tag: <meta name=&quot;revisit-after&quot; content=&quot;2 days&quot;> - SE ignore this & the ones that do read it - it could overload their system because of them visiting your site every two days & then you could be considered for spamming that SE.

Think of using robots.txt file:

http://www.coreybryant.org/robots.txt

- for more info on this:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

And link exchanges are great as well. If you are interested in that - please contact me at the below webiste to set something up.

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[Sleidia]

Hello Corey.
Thanks for taking time to write such a comprehensive post.

But in my opinion, my current troubles have nothing to do with search engine optimization since the website can be accessed from about 50 various websites including

http://www.dmoz.org.

Look at the following points:
1) When I look at the number of hits produced by dmoz.org, it is equal to zero!
2) The 50 websites produce almost no traffic (an overall of 4 hits a day).
3) On a daily basis, there are more spiders than human beings visiting the site.
4) On my other website (

http://www.humandesigner.com),

the optimization was so nicely crafted that a search on google with: freelance expert or freelance france japan or freelance franck or freelance programmer designer ... etc ... always list my website in the top 2 results ). But oddly, almost no traffic is gained from that.

My conclusion to this is that either the internet is truly a desert or I miss something! I can understand that the concept of Helpbooster can be un-attractive since people have to give a reward in exchange of help. But I can't believe no one even try to search for freelance programmers/designers via Google.

I have the feeling that the internet is dead. Or am I only isolated from the rest of the world only because of a big lack of luck?

I would like to be listed on Yahoo for a try, but they are far too expensive for me. And I believe they may not be more efficient that dmoz regarding traffic increase.

Thanks again anyway.

(|)(|)[\code]
[code]<=~x~>[\code]&quot; [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.humandesigner.com[/URL] & [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.helpbooster.com[/URL] &quot;

 

[CoreyBryant]

You can suggest a site at Yahoo:

http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

& not pay for it. I have several sites listed there & never paid them a dime.

Even though it is in the search engine - you want it to be optimized so that you will have a higher ranking. For Google, one of the things that helps - the more links you have link back to the site will help in raising your page ranking.

As far as searches, if I type in freelance programmers in Google, this site comes up:

http://www.projectspring.com/freelance/index.html

- notice freelance in the URL & the title (Web Developer Market : freelance programmer, web designer freelancer software developer computer programmer)? They only have about 19 linking back to them, but those 19 might be ranked pretty high in google. And in that page, freelance was mention 71 times. Content is everything.

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[Sleidia]

Many thanks for the Yahoo link. I'll check this out.

I agree with everything you say but does it mean that not a single person in the world within the last couple of months has done a search on Google with those two words? : FREELANCE EXPERT
I simply can't believe it.

If you look at :

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=f...l&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&safe=off

, you see that I'm well ranked don't you think. But still, no traffic.

Cheers

(|)(|)[\code]
[code]<=~x~>[\code]&quot; [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.humandesigner.com[/URL] & [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.helpbooster.com[/URL] &quot;

 

[CoreyBryant]

Well possibly not. Those two terms together - honestly, they remind of hot ice. I mean, if they are an expert why are they freelancing? Sorry to be blunt - but I do not sugarcoat things. Try to go for some other phrases, etc. If you do see that a phrase is not being beneficial to you - optimize your site for another phrase / words.

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[Sleidia]

Well, you can speak your mind, no problem !
But according to my dictionary, an expert is &quot;a person with extensive skill or knowledge in a particular field&quot; and a freelance is &quot;a self-employed person doing specific pieces of work for various employers&quot;. Why wouldn't those two definitions fit together??? Also notice that the words freelance and expert have the same meaning in french. But no one within the french/us/english audience did such a query. There is something weird somewhere.

But anyway, I get the kind of same ranking with &quot;freelance france japan&quot; and plenty of other keywords that I won't list here. But still traffic is almost zero.

I'm convinced that the internet users don't even spend time to do searches anymore. Perhaps they only use the big guys and they don't feel like they need more. Just my thoughts anyway ...

Cheers

(|)(|)[\code]
[code]<=~x~>[\code]&quot; [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.humandesigner.com[/URL] & [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.helpbooster.com[/URL] &quot;

 

[CoreyBryant]

Actually I was looking around just a few weeks ago for a freelancer from India.

As far as expert / freelancer, & especially in this day and age where people work from there home - have no office & most are not subject to rules / regulations of a company, I have noticed people tend to stray from freelancers because of this. A lot of people have been referred to me because their freelancing webmaster split on them.

Myself - I agree with you, but with the people that I have spoke to / dealt with, that seems to usually be their opinion. Most still want to do business with someone who has an office, but this day & age has changed that. And you are right - most would rather do business with someone who ws referred rather than someone they found on the internet.

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[Sleidia]

Sorry to bother you again Corey ... but could you tell me how you managed to have your name inside your browsers' specifications?? That bugs me

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Corey R. Bryant; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; Alexa Toolbar)

(|)(|)[\code]
[code]<=~x~>[\code]&quot; [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.humandesigner.com[/URL] & [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.helpbooster.com[/URL] &quot;

 

[CoreyBryant]

I'm special. LOL

I used the IEAK, created a set-up for IE & entered my name in there - sort of like how AOL, AT&T, and other ISPs if you install it from their disks. I downloaded it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ieak/default.asp

Takes just a few minutes & was just easier doing this than tweaking the registry. Everytime I tried to do that - it never worked right.

__________________________
Corey

http://www.merchantaccounts4less.com

 

[fhlee]

Hi Sleidia,
Just my 2 cents worth. I tend to agree with Corey that {freelance expert} is not a normal term used to search for freelancer... I wouldn't. If I were to search for a freelancer, I'll search for [topic] {freelancer} [location]; ie, ASP freelancer france. So, maybe you should reconsider your search term. I'm just a 'normal guy' Also, after doing a search on {freelancer expert}, your site is listed with a non-specific title. A programmer is very general, perhaps you'd like to specify your area of expertise. Also, the next line says: find client and 10%. If I do a search for freelancer, I'm probably not looking for a commission, so, I will probably skip your listing and go for the next.

I use Google a lot for my advertising and they do produce good results. Believe me, there are a lot of people using search engines...

regards,
- Joseph
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