Part I : Getting Free Hits Using These Simple Tips & Tricks

By Prashant Parikh
Posted Monday, July 26, 2004

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines still remain the #1 tool to generate free targeted traffic to any website, so make sure that your site is indexed in every major search engine. Do a through check of all the meta tags and make sure you are not missing any one. The most important meta tag is the "Title" tag which should be kept short and sweet. Then there comes the "Description" and the "Keywords" tags, please make sure that you are not dumping keywords on this tag which do not belong to your website. e.g. don't include keywords for selling perfumes when you are selling books. Make sure that the description and the keywords are relevant to your website. Another major things that no one would tell you is that you MUST have the keywords and description embedded on your site to get a high rank in search engine. What I mean by this is, if you keywords include "Candy, Gum, Lollypop" etc.. and description is "We sell all types of chocolates and candy here" etc. them you MUST have the same words somewhere in your webpage. This is how the search engines check the relevancy of the meta tags. These are just 3 of the major meta tags which should be there on every page. With the ever growing search engine popularity and the way they categorize they searches there are some other meta tags which should be used to describe the site, like "Language", "Robots" , "Revisit" etc. To get details on these tags click this link.

Please make a note that you need to get your website listed on, DMOZ which is a largest human edited directory and which has links with all the major search engines. Listing on DMOZ is free and it can bring highly targeted traffic to your website as well as improve your ranking on other search engines. visit (http://www.dmoz.org)

** NEVER use refresh or redirect scripts on your index pages as most of the search engines will exclude those pages.

Link Exchange

This is undoubtedly the second major free targeted traffic source. Now, not many webmasters know that having hundreds of link on their website linking to other UN-Related websites will do more harm than good to them. First rule of thumb, NEVER have lots of out-bound link on your index page and secondly exchange links with only those website which have similar content or sell complementary products. Search engines are very smart and can easily know from your meta tags if the site you are linking to has similar content or not. Don't try to fool the search engine or you will end up a fool yourself. I know that exchanging links is not simple and take time, but is the best time investment you will ever do. Having quality site linking to you would mean a better rank to your website. Another important think to note is that it would be better if you exchange text links rather then graphics as this would be more search engine friendly. Also keep changing your text link description from time to time so that you can have fresh and different keywords fed to searches.

So, now the questing is how do you find similar website... very easy. Do a search on google or DMOZ directory and you will get a list of websites. The contact the webmaster individually of every website and ask them for a link exchange.

I also found this website very useful in finding similar content websites. (http://www.linkexchange.com)

Affiliate Program

Have you ever paid to have your banners displayed 10,000 times and end up paying 10 cents a lick and not getting any sale out of it? This is what happens to most of us when start advertising for our website and products. We think that even if out of those 1000 people who would visit, even if 5% buy something then we have made a profit! but how often does this happen? Close to never. Why pay per click when you can start your own affiliate program and pay commission per sale. Yes right! you don't pay your affiliates till the time someone actually buys anything from your website. This way you get all the clicks you want and if no one buys anything, they you also don't loose anything. You can promote your affiliate program to other webmasters through discussion boards or emails, think about it, you can have tons of webmasters linking to your products and you don't spend a dime until you get paid! Sounds great!

Check of this website if you want to start your own Affiliate program or you can pay some money to have it setup for you. (http://www.cj.com)

About The Author
Article by Prashant Parikh. Webmaster of (http://www.ishopindia.com)