Create a Google Profile and Add Your Links

Do you know what the most popular site on the internet is? If you said Google, you're right. They are ranked #1 and probably will be for a long time. Did you know they let you create a free profile with lots of links to your favorite web sites? The power of links from popular web sites cannot be emphasized enough. Along with optimization, it is one of the primary ways to get your site listed highly in search engines. So, create a Google profile today and put all of your sites' links in it! Start by creating a free Gmail email account and you can quickly create a profile from there. Here is a link to my Google profile.

Join Discussion Boards and Forums

Join some discussion boards and forums, create a profile with your site’s link in it, put your link in your signature (which applies it to all of your posts) and begin posting relevant messages. Posting messages in a popular forum is a great way to spread links to your site. Not only will you get more traffic from clicks, but you can also increase your page rank by being linked from a popular site.

Consider Your Bandwidth Usage and Server RAM

Consider your bandwidth. Do you have enough? How much are you using? Every site has a limit on their bandwidth because the server has a limit. Think of bandwidth like the water that travels through a hose. The hose represents your bandwidth limit and the water represents all of the computers connected to your site.

If you’re running out of bandwidth, there are some ways to fix it. You can avoid letting people hotlink your images. You can block spiders or site harvesters or you can cut back on the number of large files (e.g. mp3 files, video files) you have on your site. You can also contact your host and ask for more bandwidth. Sometimes, it's very inexpensive (e.g. $5-10/month extra).

Another important thing to consider is your server's RAM. Just like the computer you're using right now, your server has RAM. If it doesn't have enough, it'll run slowly. How can you know if you have enough? Visit your web site and click a link and see how fast the page loads. Click another link and see. If you have a good computer that usually opens pages quickly and your pages are taking a long time to load, then the server load is likely too high. You may need more RAM.

Your visitor and page view count effect your server's performance. If you have a lot of visitors visiting at certain hours, they may experience some slowing. Try visiting your site at peak times (e.g. late morning and early afternoon) to see how quick it is. Visit some other sites and compare it. If you think it's too slow, then contact your host and ask for more RAM.

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.

Use Free Advertising Web Sites to Improve Your Page Rank

Use free advertising sites (like this one) to improve your site's page rank! When you have your link on another web site, it improves your page rank in search engines and when your page rank improves, your site will be listed higher for its search terms. For example, let's say you have a site about swimming lessons in Atlanta. You'll want your site to be listed on the first page (e.g. top ten) in the Google search engine when potential clients use Google and type "swimming lessons Atlanta". This means you should try to get your web site’s link on as many web sites as possible. Check your local newspaper’s site, free ad sites, forums where you can create a profile with a link, Free For All links pages and any other site that will allow you to post a free link!