marketing my site

[askjoe]

Ok....I've created, in my opinion, a halfway decent affiliate website - Onelastrep.com. My question is, how do I go about getting it out into the market. I've already submitted it to all the various directories and search engines - I read up on this a lot. I've tried to trade links but it seems as if all the "heavy hitters" within my industry don't want to trade with me (or any affiliate website).

My site offers advice on products as well as several articles on fitness and nutrition. Should I keep attempting to trade links? Do I keep submitting to the search engines? I already have a lot of time invested in this and want to see it work. However, if for some reason my site never gets listed, I don't want to be wasting my time.

Where do I go from here?

Kyle

[spufi]

http://www.webmasterkorner.com/metatags.html

Check out there for what meta tags do, and I would be interested to see what adding the meta tag for robots does for you. I guess I'm not sure what default is used if you don't specify it. Also look at your keywords. While you can use spaces to seperate your words, I would try to add commas and a space in between the words because doing so helps distinguish a key word from a key phrase.

A couple of things about your site. I'm curious to know what program you used to create you OnLastRep.com image. It looks a little rough. Nothing too bad, but it could have a smoother look to it.

Beating the ever present drum here. Learn to validate your page and to use CSS. You'll save yourself time and headaches doing so. I saw one of your tags use a silly amount of non-breaking spaces. Using CSS will help get rid of that and clean up your code many times over. As an example, you use a font tag to just define the color properties of a link. With CSS you can define all of your link properties in a few short lines and then all you need to do is add just you links where you want them. Define your CSS in a external style sheet and you can have the same properties on all of your pages that you link to the external style sheet. I'll post a link as an example of a site I did. I do know that I need to go back and touch some things up, ie meta tags, how I did the menu, etc. I'm not saying it's the best example, just an example.

http://www.lauramccandliss.com/

[askjoe]

Alright, I see what you mean about hyperlinks - I did my site in front page - and it's my first one - I've been trying to use their templetes however they never seemed to work right.

If you could look at this site - bodybuildingforyou.com - this is the site I'm trying emulate - they do very well in terms of affiliate marketing. I know it's all content and backend stuff that gets you a good ranking - I think the content is there I just don't know if the back end is.

Also, as far as submitting to google is concerned - once that's done do I just sit back and weight?

Kyle

[spufi]

Don't worry about the having incorrect code for your first site. I was way off on what I should have done too. I just went and learned from it.

Now that I mention changing how you do your keywords, the link below shows you why they are meaningless at this point.

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/02/10-meta.html

They can still be a good way to see what you are using for people to see your site. I looked at your first keyword and then I looked at the other one you mentioned. Your first keyword was xenadrine. Their's was Bodybuilding. You might want to think about how user friendly your words that people would most likely search for you under are being used.
And if you haven't, register with Yahoo and Google. If I only registered with one search engine, Google would be it.

[meow]

You don't have any headers or alt texts (just looked at the front page). Both will a make difference. Appropriate headers. Alt text for every single image except spacers and such.

Search engines love good structure. :p

[wieczor8]

The fastest way to get on Google is to get your link posted on a site that already gets spidered by them.

You are trying to link vertically.
That won't work they are your competition, try for horzonal
linkage.

Ie not with other affiliates, but sites about making money,
webmasters help, free graphic sites. etc.

Now there are so many web sites Google only gets around to spidering them every 30 days, so if they just spidered a site you did links with it will be 2 month wait worst case.

Key is to getting on sites already being spidered by Google, use google search engine to find them.

This is just the start of a lot of work, next step is raising your ranking once your listed.

Gerald
Internet Anthropologist

[Timuc]

You can also try some traffic exchange sites. There is a good one I use http://bannerchain.com
They offer banner exchange exit exchange, text exchange, popup exchange, directory listing, start page exchange, etc.under one account.

It worked for my web site..


P.S: I personally do not like to use popups.

Good Luck.
Timuc