For example, on a Teen Centered link engine you may use words like funky, neato, boss, ppl, cu, l8r, 4u, and so on to describe your site because it’s part of the language teens use. On an O-So-Serious search engine catering mostly for retired folk you would not dare use these words because no one would understand you! Automated software simply cannot do this!

There is absolutely no benefit if your site is in 1,000,000 search engines but no one clicks anyway. It must say the right stuff and it must be in the right category. As the person who creates the site only you have the knowledge to do this right. Don’t waste your money on automated software submission software. It doesn’t work.

• Pay per click
• Pay per month/year etc. (Recommended if the site has qualified traffic and enough hits).
• Pay per veiws

Pay per month is obviously much easier to budget for as your cost is fixed but it will depend on how much traffic a site gets. You may find the one better than the other. It’s very much a trial and error thing and you have to try it for a month with a given advertiser to see which works best. We offer this type of [button/banner] advertising on some of our high traffic sites here.

This kind of advertising, is often the best since you will be drawing your visitors from a source that is related to your site. For example, advertising your yacht business from a banner on a large yachting message board will guarantee your visitors are mostly yacht enthusiasts. (It’s unlikely you will sell any yachts on a skate boarding site)

pop-under and pop-up advertising

Don’t! As simple as that. Don’t do it. Most Browsers these days block Pop-Ups so it has become a pretty useless form of advertising.

redirected traffic

A relatively new development is redirected traffic reselling. How it works is that people buy up old domain names — sometimes by the thousands. These are all kinds of domains. For example, companies that went bust, old websites that were abandon by the original owners etc etc. These domains still get traffic simply because they are listed in the search engines and they come up from time to time when people search for certain words.

You go to a company or individual who bought a whole bunch of these domains and they set them up to redirect the traffic that would have gone to the old domain to your site instead. In principle this is a great idea but in practice it’s a failure. Don’t buy this kind of traffic.

Why not? You ask. Simple – you have no idea what kind of traffic is being sent you you. Let’s say you have a site which sells second hand antique furniture. What value would traffic intended for a manufacturing company specializing in the manufacture of rocket fuel have for you? No matter how many rocket fuel visitors you get, it is highly unlikely any would be interested in your furniture. Traffic must be targeted if it is to be of value.

“Social Networking” sites

I put this in quotes because this would include everything from YouTube to Twitter to the mega blogging sites and everything in between. All good and all will generate some hits, just be careful not to overdo it: getting yourself banned on YouTube or your blog about your website on BlogSpot is so obviously an ad doesn’t help. People want information, not more ads; we all get them up to our eyeballs on radio and TV every day. Be informative, give information but don’t advertise.

General Warning: Regardless of which type of traffic you buy or use, be very careful of who you get it from. There are several companies and individuals out there who will send you thousands of unique IP address hits to your site (which you can verify in your logs), but no one will ever see your page/s! There are several techniques for doing this and you could easily be caught. (Some of the techniques involve things like opening your whole page in a 1 * 1 pixel window for example. You get the unique hit but no one saw your page … not unless they had x-ray vision like superman!)

What works best?

It depends on several factors — your site, the sellers site and many more. Fixed text link and fixed banner advertising are always the best. Why do I say that? Two reasons:

• Because you are not only getting the traffic from the sellers site but you are also getting a fixed link from the sellers site. This cannot be over emphasized. This will boost your ranking in all the major search engines and will do so for as long as your link/banner is on the sellers site. If the seller’s site is highly ranked in the search engines, your site will benefit greatly! Read what Google has to say about this here.
• Conversely, when the link to your site is in JavaScript (most do it this way), you may get the clicks but you benefit nothing from the page rank of the site referring to your site. (And I would argue that this back-link, as it is called, is more important)
• Provided you have some means of knowing how much traffic the page gets your banner/link is on it is also the safest form of advertising — you can go to the sellers site anytime to see your link or banner. With any of the other methods, you have no guarantees at all that anyone even went to your site.

Bottom line: You get what you pay for. If someone is offering you 100,000 hits for $25.00, think carefully before you spend your money because that is a price that is way too low and it might just be a scam. For pop-up/pop-under advertising (which you should never use!) expect to pay around $0.01 to $0.10 per page view and for banner advertising in the same order for monthly advertising and $0.20 and up for click through advertising.

1. S/he never adds the reciprocal link back to you. You’ve been had!
   OR
2. S/he sends you and email saying “here’s the page with your link …” but the page with your link is not linked from anywhere else on this person’s site! You get it? Your link is on the other site but the page it is on can never be found on that site … you’ve been scammed!
   OR
3. S/he waits for 2 weeks then removes your link but you still link to him/her. Scammed again!

Reciprocal links are great and work very well because of the way search engines rank sites. However, they are open to abuse. Use with caution and be sure you grasp what is written above before blindly jumping onto the reciprocal link bandwagon.

• Some search engines will automatically drop your listing after a preset time. Others won’t.
• Some search engines will penalize (even permanently ‘ban’ your site) if you re-submit it too often.

Bottom Line – make sure you find out these things about the search engine you are submitting to and then comply with their rules.

• Here lies my dearly departed Martha. In heaven she is, not in hell, this I know well.
• Here lies my dearly departed Martha. In heaven she is not, in hell, this I know well.

While on the subject of spelling and grammar, don’t forget that English is not spelt (or spoken) the same all over the world. There is a vast difference between American English and British English spelling for example. It is not really important which spelling you decide to go with provided you are consistent.

Always keep in mind your intended audience when adding text. For example, the word ‘Ketchup’ is a common word in America but someone in South Africa won’t know what that is because they call it ‘Tomato Sauce’. There are hundreds of words and phrases we take for granted that either mean something completely different to someone from another part of the world or has no meaning at all.

Also, some words or phrases are considered vulgar in some cultures but not in others. Be aware of your audience.

Similarly, keep in mind the intended age of your audience. Very few teenagers would be likely to know what “baby-boomer generation” means.

• “Shipley boats” – your company name, appears several times. Telling the engine it’s important,
• You have used words like delivered, helicopter, pre-fueled ocean faring etc. All these words are potential terms someone using a search engine looking for boats may be using. Use them liberally, they will maximize your chances of being found.

• You are not really interested in the website [so why should s/he be?]
• You don’t know what you are doing [so if you are selling something, why should s/he believe you?]
• You never update your site [so he's reading old news]

There are tons of places you can go to check out the links on your site. A free one that we use you can download from here.

• The colors they use for text, hyperlinks etc.
• The placement of the navigation links on their pages.

Bottom line – Everyone has been to Google or MSN or AltaVista. If your visitors are likely to be ‘Internet novices’ by all means make your site mimic these sites. This way, you will be sure your visitors  will feel ‘at home’ on your site.

• Many Internet surfers disable JavaScript in their Browsers. Some intentionally, some because they don’t know. The reasons aren’t very important but the fact is around 22% of all people surfing the Internet have JavaScript disabled for one or other reason.
• Different Browsers (Netscape, MSIE, Opera etc) need slightly different Java commands or they give errors. If your pages only work with Microsoft Browsers of a specific version you automatically exclude all the others. This makes for a direct reduction in your traffic to your site.
• Search Engines generally do not follow JavaScript Links. If you use them only link to pages that are not important for Search Engine placement.

If you must use JavaScript, make sure you test it on all the Browsers you can lay your hands on to be sure your visitors won’t get error messages which will surely make them click off your site.

• Many of the search engines will not list sites that are not ‘primary’ e.g. http://example.com
• A domain name like http://example.com/thisdirecory/thatdirectory/index.htm hard to remember. If your visitor liked your page and wants to come back but did not bookmark you, s/he probably wont be able to find your site again.

We did an experiment some years ago to prove this. Here’s what we did:

• We created two identical 2-page websites.
• The one website we put up at geocities (free website). The other we put on it’s own domain.
• We submitted both to exactly the same search engines.

The result?

After 6 months, the geocities page had 547 hits and the one that had it’s own domain had 5,200 – almost 10 times more! Having your own domain does make a big difference!

1. You have nothing to say, so you filled your page with every bit of Internet junk you could find,
2. The site is so unpopular you have resorted to desperate measures to get traffic.

Banner Exchanges, Site Awards and the like all have their place. However, it is the experience of the author that they generally don’t provide what they promise – traffic. Most banner exchanges work on a 2:1 ratio. That is, for every 2 times someone else’s banner is displayed on your page, your banner will be displayed on someone else’s page. Now ask yourself this. When last did you click on a banner on someone else’s website? For most people the answer is either “a year ago” or “never”. Contrary to popular belief, banners Exchanges don’t generally work if you want to build a really prime site.