Everywhere you turn, there are offers for you to make thousands of dollars a month and what all these offers have in common is that each claims theirs is the best, fastest, and easiest way to get rich. Affiliate programs are one of these offers and like the real estate schemes and door to door sales companies of the past, they simply don't work. Today, affiliate programs are the Internet version of telemarketing and pyramid schemes. The best way to make money with an affiliate program is to avoid it completely and invest your time in your own business, your own domain, and your own website.
Once you've registered your own personal domain name and built your website to your satisfaction ? that is, it uploads quickly; there are no errors in grammar or spelling or price; and it represents your business, products, and services accurately ? then and only then is it time to register your website with the search engines.
Registering your personal domain with the search engines is how you draw traffic to your website from across the globe. People who type in search words that are associated with what you have to offer (your business; services and products) should be able to find your website among the listings that the search engine returns. For this to happen, you must register your site with each search engine.
All of the search engines have a similar system for new sites to sign up. Here is an example for Google. First, go online, open your browser, and head to the Google website (www.google.com). Click the 'About Google' link. There are four major sections of links; one of them is listed as being for 'Site Owners.' That's you! The last link on the list is 'Submit Your Content to Google.' That's the link you want. The first link on that page is 'Add Your URL to Google's Index.' Click on this link. From here, there are full directions on how to list your domain name or URL so that it will be included in searches that Google does.
It may take a few days to go into effect. Give it about 5-7 days and enter in a variety of terms into the search engine that you've signed up with, including the exact name of your website, to see how high up on the list your site shows up. Do you see it at all? Is it on page 20? Many business and website owners obsess about their rankings on search engines. They want their site to be the first one on the list. Don't put this pressure on yourself. There are bound to be a variety of businesses that combine words that are in your business name and services. Your first priority should be to build a solid business and begin to generate traffic to your website. Worry about your rankings later.
Holden, Greg. Starting an Online Business for Dummies, 2nd Edition. IDG Worldwide Books, Inc. Foster City, CA: 2000. p. 227-28.
Internet Search Engines List
Webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a robots meta tag. If for some reason you do not want a search engine spider to crawl a page you do have the means to do so.
When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root folder is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and only pages not disallowed will be crawled. However this is not always fool proof. Search engine spiders have a habit of going away from a page and then coming back and looking at the page a second time later. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wished crawled.
Pages that most webmasters prefer not be crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. Other pages that you might not want crawled, depending on the content might be a guest book that you expect to be filled with spam or a feedback system that is not very flattering to you. It is also a good idea to instruct the spiders not to crawl a page with a lot of animation or flash on it as this can be mistakenly read by a spider as a malfunctioning site.
Both Alastair Hayward & Chris Angus are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.