Getting Your Site's Link on Spiderable Web Sites

As I've stated before, your web site's page rank is determined by the search engines and one of their top criteria is inbound links. However, if your link is on a site that automatically uses a nofollow code, search engines won't recognize or spider the link. Sites like Craigslist, MySpace and Facebook use nofollow coding to cut down on spam. Therefore, putting your link on a site like Craigslist will only produce some click through traffic, which is good, but not as good as increasing your page rank in the search engines.

There are a number of web sites who will allow you to add a link (or a list of links) for free. Many of these sites are called social bookmarking sites like Listable, Digg, Furl, Flickr, Propeller, Technorati, Slashdot, Searchles and Yahoo Bookmarks. If you're not sure whether or not a site is using the nofollow coding or not, right click on the page in question, choose View Source and do a search for "nofollow". If you see it before your links, then you know the search engines won't spider them.

Remember, when you get your site's link on a very popular web site, search engines conclude your site is popular, too! Use your time and resources wisely and add your links to as many spiderable web sites as possible.

Create a Robots.txt File

Search engine robots spider your web site all of the time, so they can find your new and updated web pages for their search engines. This is a good thing. However, if you don’t have a robots.txt file, your server will report errors and the spiders may not understand what to crawl. There are many tutorials online regarding how to create these files and it is very easy to do. You could also save the line of text below into a text file, name it robots.txt and put it in your main file directory, in case you want them to spider everything.

User-agent: *

That's it! However, if you have some private folders and don't want the spiders to locate them, you'll need to do something slightly more complicated. Simply Google the solution and you can find what you need.

Start an Email Subscription Mailing List

Email is the best way to keep in touch with your clients, subscribers and friends. Many companies host lists freely or inexpensively. I've had some bad experiences with a couple of the smaller companies, so I now host my own list. It's actually very easy unless you're getting lots of removal emails. I simply direct all of the requests to join our list to a folder in Outlook, then I export those emails every time I send to them. I rarely gets removal emails, but when I do, I simply do those by hand.

Once you start your email list, check with your ISP to see their sending limits. You may need to break up your list into parts. For instance, Time Warner allows approximately 1200 emails to be sent each day, but they have to be in chunks smaller than 100.