Mystic Charms Forum

Quite a few of you (especially new ecommerce members) seem a little unsure of how to promote your websites...

When you first build a website (or have one built) it can be hard to get visitors and sales, this is not because people don't like your website - it's because they do not know it exists

The fact of the matter is - you need to be found on the internet, and to do this you need to be listed and ranked well in "search engines" (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live! etc)
There is no simple way of achieving this - it's the holy grail of all website owners to get to the top of the search engines for highly search for keywords and keyphrases.

So let's start with the basics - in order for the search engines to even find your website you need inbound links, these are links from other website's to yours. It is highly advised NOT to exchange links (i.e. a website will link to you if you link back to them) as these kind of link exchanges are now frowned upon by Google...

So what can you do?

You can submit your website to web directories!

Web Directories are huge catalogues that list website's and link to them, I will tell you now that there is probably little to no hope of a human ever clicking on your link in a directory BUT the search engines will find them and follow the link back to your website, the more directory links you have... the more the search engines will visit and (usually) the higher your search engine ranking will be.

It can be a really pain to submit your website to directories, you need to find these directories first, then you need to find the correct category for your website and then you need to spend 5 - 10 minutes filling in a form on each one, that is why I offer a service to do this for you!

All directory submissions are done BY HAND - I do not use automated software.

Prices:

20 Directories £10
50 Directories £25
100 Directories £45
200 Directories £90
400 Directories £170
800 Directories £300

You can read more here http://www.totalwebdevelopment.co.uk/dir...ssion.html

If you enter the following promotional code in to the checkout system "mystic101" (without the quotes) then you will receive 10% off the above prices!

Hi Tony, Are you sure that link exchanges are frowned upon by google? I get web pro news newsletter and they have messages from people at google (I think they are called Larry and Serge) from time to time and they said this is not the case at all. This was only a couple of weeks ago.

Yeah - I get the same newsletter, the only reason I keep getting it is because I delete instead of unsubscribing...

If you want to Google for "why link exchanges are a bad idea" or similar then you will find lots of blog posts, forums posts and articles on the subject, you can then make up your own mind...

My favourite quote so far is:

Not sure at all myself about link exchanges, I have no evidence that they do work, only evidence is that getting a pr2 (which did need some exchanges) helped me get on first few pages of google.com, but beyond that its tweaking. I tweaked "witchcraft supplies" for 2 months and got no new links but jumped from 44th to bottom of page one now (google.com), and that was down to increasing keyword density etc (obvious SEO stuff), not links or link exchange.

I had a look at that article geoff, it says

(Link exchanges are not to be confused with good natural reciprocal linking, which involves two sites that link to each other contextually on different pages.)

That just seems to be talking about links soley for the purpose of seo. Everywhere seems to say that relevant links from sites with a similar theme are benificial.

I think relevant linking from pages of similar content and directories of similar content is the way to go.
adding an MC site to a directory of computer manuals would not really be of any use and may be detremental.
Having said that, manual submissions to relevant sites would work.
Or at least that is my thoughts on the matter

so that seems to be saying avoid link farms, I think. Though not completely sure what this means "link to each other contextually on different pages."

I dont know what contextually means either?!?

If anyone does know please post!

So if you like something on my site you write about it and link to me, I can then like something on your site, write about it and link back...

Because Google reads the text around a link as well as the link itself it can see that you are linking to the other site because of the other website's content and not because they link back to you - the same applies to the other site that links back... Phew!

Thanks Tony