Getting Your First Visitors

The biggest and most important issue that a webmaster will have to face is getting his/her visitors. This is the million dollar question and it escapes the grasp of most web designers. In this web site design article you will get some expert tips on how to get visitors to your site, and it will save you hours of feeling like nobody wants to come to your site. We will discuss some of the key techniques that the best webmasters use.

Building your site is the easy part, getting people to visit your site is the hard part. Most people who have a site think that they can submit their site to Google, and visitors will just come flooding their doors. This is not true and it won't work. The first thing to do when you build your site is to make sure your meta tags are in working order and that they target what your site is all about. Make sure that you have some of your keywords in your title, description, and the body of your page. Search engines love this, but make sure you don't use to many keywords and a description that is longer than this article. Meta tag optimization is a whole nother topic, and we won't go into detail here. The next thing to do is to manually submit yourself to the top search engines. Using free search engine submitters don't always work and most of them are just a scam. If you manually submit, the search engines will like it better. Run a google search on search engines, and you will get a whole list of engines to submit to. After you fix up your Meta Tags, think about the content of your site. Search engines love having good quality content and they rank you higher for it. If your site is just a gateway page with hundreds of links, not very many people will come to your site, and the search engines will hate you. You want to offer something useful to your visitors, something that helps them. Think about publishing some articles, or anything else that your visitors will benefit from. People also love getting things for free. A lot of people will come to your site if you offer a quality service for free. It is just common nature for people to love free things. Dont you? You have now covered the first step in getting visitors, and that is to get your feet wet in the world of search engines. We will now move on to the next step, link exchanges.

Link exchanging is not only a great way to get visitors, but the search engines will rank you better if you have a good amount of links. Having links on other sites is a flag to tell search engines that you have a quality site. It shows that other people like your site, and not just you. This is where I am going to show you my favorite technique for getting link exchanges. First you must go to LinkPopularity.com. Here you will see a little bar at the bottom of the page. You are supposed to enter your own url to check how many people have linked to you, but what I do is enter the url of my competitors. Isn't that great. You now have a whole list of contacts that your competitors have linked to. All you have to do is contact the owners of the sites about a link exchange, and you will most likely get your first exchange. I have learned this great trick from LinkPopularity and they have a whole article about checking your competitors links. Now that you know where to get your contacts, we must now discuss how to go about contacting them. Before you even think of contacting them, add their url to your links pages. This shows the webmaster that you are serious about a link exchange, and they are impressed by it. Somewhere in your email you can even mention that you have already added their link to your page. Your email about a link exchange could look something like this.

Hello, my name is (your name) and I would like to do a link exchange with your web site. My web site offers (what do you offer) and I thought that we would be good link partners. I have already taken the liberty to add your website to my links page, which is (your link page url).

Thank you for you time,

(your name)

Be sure to be friendly in your email and explain why you would be good link partners. If the webmaster accepts, you will get your very own link on another persons website. You now have a link on someones site, and your search engine rank will increase. After you have done this to as many people as you possibly can, do it some more. You can never have to many links. It makes your site well known to the world, and the search engines will crawl your site more frequently because they find your site by skipping from links on peoples sites.

I hope that you have learned something from this article and that you can maybe get a couple of new visitors because of it. Just remember, it takes patience to get visitors. I mean, you are one in millions of web pages, and that just means you have to work ten times harder than all of your competition to get visitors. In time, if you follow everything here, there is no reason for you to not have thousands of visitors in the next couple of months.

This article was written by Christian from Smart Boy Designs http://www.smartboydesigns.com Smart Boy Designs offers free html help articles, and tutorials.

Christian owns and operates Smart Boy Designs. http://www.smartboydesigns.com This site offers free html tutorials, html help, and articles. You can also get a site built for you!