Tips?

[dshopper]

Folks, I am all over the place looking for tips for promoting my site - I have done quite a bit of work but almost 4 months in, no traffic yet. Any ideas?

[chris_fuel]

It's hard to give any advice on this without knowing what "a bit of work" is. What kind of promotion were you doing?

[frank1]

well in this site there was one very good article covering all possible techique for small site ...from link exchange to ..sticking sticker in car mirror..tshirts...
i dont remember the excat link but may be searching this forum you can get that post..was good...with many replies...and tips..

[Shyflower]

If you're not getting traffic, your problem is probably not as much promotion as it is optimization. Have a read through the Search Engine FAQs and use those tips as a starting point.

If you're looking for more ways to promote your site, read the promotional sticky at the top of this forum.

[LazySEO]

It's hard to give suggestions without knowing what you've tried, but 4 months seems like a long time to go without any traffic at all.

Here's some of my best free ways to generate traffic:

1. Write articles and submit to article distribution sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com, http://www.goarticles.com, http://www.isnare.com, etc.

2. Submit to free web directories. There's a good list here: http://www.info.vilesilencer.com.

3. Sign up for accounts with social bookmarking sites and post articles from your site there.

4. Find forums related to your site's topic and put a link in your signature.

5. Write a press release announcing your site and distribute it.

Let us know what you've tried so far and you'll probably get better information.

[dshopper]

Thanks guys. The one thing that I had not looked at all was optimization.

[dvduval]

Is the content on your site unique?
How hard are you working on producing content?
(Google likes unique content)

[dshopper]

I believe the content is unique - still needs quite some work though. I tweaked a few things over the weekend and started seeing some organic traffic today but its too early to tell.

[dvduval]

It's very important that a lot of thought is going into your content. Try to see it from our perspective. Why would we bother looking any further than the homepage? What is special about the site?

[Shyflower]

It's very important that a lot of thought is going into your content. Try to see it from our perspective. Why would we bother looking any further than the homepage? What is special about the site?

I think the problem is that he isn't getting traffic to his home page or any other page.

I took a look at your site and it seems like you have a good idea, clean design, and good descriptions of the business sites in your discount directory.

What you don't have is a good description of your site on your home page. In Google, you are #3 for your doman name, but not on the first page for "discount shopping".

I understand why you may not want to clutter the active window on your home page with information about your site. However, I think this is one of the unfortunate cases where the visitor sees exactly what you offer, but the Search Engines can't determine the topic of your site because of lack of descriptive text.

My suggestions:

1. Make the site name in your header clickable to the home page and put it in an h1 text format. Style it with css. I'd make it about 1.3em.

2. You have a lot of unused space in your header. Consider adding a text block (<p> </p>) that is descriptive of what your site offers. Be sure to include your keywords, but don't stuff it. By looking at the rest of your site content, I think you understand what I mean.
Try expanding on something like "Find big savings, special offers, and discount shopping deals up to (?)%." End with the line about your site that is presently in your active window.

3. If you have the investment, do use adwords or some other system to get the word out about your site.

4. Make relevant comments on shopping blogs. If you can find a shopping blog or two that allow guest posts, inquire about writing one. Consider adding a blog to your site.

5. Add some articles to your site telling shoppers what to look for in a good discount vs. a bogus one, clipping coupons etc.

[dshopper]

I took a lot of the advice that everyone was very kind to offer here, was pretty excited about the changes I had made, deployed the changes then I noticed something strange - as soon as Google crawled my site, the backlinks {previously over 100 in Google) to my site fell down to 2!! What did I miss?

[WEBLAUNCHPHXX]

I took a lot of the advice that everyone was very kind to offer here, was pretty excited about the changes I had made, deployed the changes then I noticed something strange - as soon as Google crawled my site, the backlinks {previously over 100 in Google) to my site fell down to 2!! What did I miss?

I think you should try to get some natural links through the following steps

$-social networking/bookmarking.
$-press releases and articles submissions.
$-Quality links(one way).
$-forum and blog posting.

[dshopper]

My point is that I had done all those things, the links query on google previously returned all those backlinks but for some reason, it is not returning them now!

[blabto]

Feel very much like you at the moment. Have tried the majority of different methods to try and promote the site. Probably the best two have been google adwords and article submission.

For the articles, I went to http://www.getafreelancer.com and gave the project for $50. Pleased with results.

Keep going!