So you have sweated through the past several months, wrung your creative juices dry and finally there it is - your first web site uploaded into cyberspace - for all to rhapsodize over. But the days turn to weeks and you realise with a sinking feeling that far from being showered with accolades, no one knows about your site, except of course for family and friends and what is more important, it looks like no one ever will. So what do you do? You have two options - you can give up or you can go on, because if you use this first website that you have created as a spring board to mastering the ins and outs of succeeding online, there need be no limit to what you can do with your new found knowledge.



The first mistake that any newcomer to website creation makes is thinking that if he/she builds a great site, success immediately follows. Yes, it is true that the site should have lots of information relevant to what ever its central theme is, the graphics should be attractive and it should be user friendly. But that is just the beginning. The next part is the hardest and the most frustrating and yet it can be most rewarding. It is the actual promotion of your site, in other words, selling it to the vast masses who surf the net everyday. Whether your site deals with products - physical or digital, services or plain information, whether the content is free or has to be paid for, unless it comes to the attention of those who would benefit from it, it might just as well have remained just an idea unborn.

The dynamics of a successful website are easy to understand - High Page Rank when indexed by Google, Yahoo or any of the main search engines leads to greater amount of TRAFFIC to your site and the more the traffic, the higher the page rank. How do you get a high page rank on Google or Yahoo? Let us look at a few options:-

Build Links - Link building is an important part of ranking high in the search engine indexes. Search engines such as Google base the importance of your web site on the number of links that point to you. There are two types of links, reciprocal and one way. Reciprocal links are when you swap your link with someone else’s website. You link to their web site and they link to yours. While this can help your ranking, most web sites rate one way links as being much more important. One way links are those from a web site that point to your site but you do not link to theirs.

Find Good Niches - There are plenty of great topics on the internet, but many are oversaturated. Why compete with 10 million web sites, when you can compete with only 10,000. Choose a niche that will draw visitors to your site. If you have to compete with millions of other web sites, your chance of success will be low.

Calculated Use of Keywords - Using keywords judicially on each web page enables the search engines to index your site faster provided that the keywords are not simply generic but targeted to the specific content of your web pages as well as to what the visitor is looking for when he/she comes to your site. The use of good keyword tools helps narrow the keywords that are relevant to the contents of your web pages.

Web Content - They say that content is king. Those websites that have lots of freshly updated content can expect to see many search engine spiders visit their web sites. Search engines want to give their customers information that they need, this comes down to content. The more good content you have, the better the odds of attracting search engine spiders and rating high in the search engine rankings.

Article Writing - Writing articles and web logs (blogs) are relatively easy ways of getting name recognition and building trust and loyalty between you and your readers as well as getting links to your site and adding fresh content to it. You can write articles on any subject, preferably one that is relevant to your site and submit them, free of charge, to various article directories from where they are picked up by those looking for content for their own sites.

Blogs - Blogging is an almost instant publishing of content to a website. It provides a powerful mode of interaction with your visitors as they can comment on your entries and as the author of the blog you can choose to publish them alongside your own writing. You can also link to other blogs that interest you and they can link back thus increasing the number of visitors reading your articles. Blogs are easy to install and usually free. There are also services such as Blogger.com and Typepad that can host your blog for free, though some sites do charge a hosting fee.