Hi Guys,
I'm new to all the website stuff...so...help!   
I just got my site up and running...still adding things, and trying to make it better.  The biggest thing for me right now, is that I can't spend a lot of money on promoting it, so...
What is the best way to get my site noticed?  I realize that it will take some time and all, but I'm sure there's more I need to be doing to make it better.  Right now, I don't think it even comes up on search engines at all...or on page 100 or something!   
Any advice, with minimal cost, would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Sara

My best advice is to update your site as often as you can.

I spend nothing on advertising my site, but I do update it 5 days a week. Doesn't matter what it's about, so long as I update.

Google ranks pages according to: how often a site is updated (if you update once a month, google 'spiders' - or revisits your site - once a month. Update once a week, it will visit once a week), how many sites link to yours, and how many hits you get.

Because I've been updating my site 5 days a week for over a year, my site usually comes up in the first two or three pages of results. The top results especially if you're using Google Australia.

Go to sites like puppetresources.com and do a link exchange: they link to your site and you link to yours. This way, you also have sites linking to you, which improves google ranking.

Another thing you need to do is make sure you have good 'metadata' (keywords) placed somewhere in your code. Ie. if you want people to visit your site based on selling puppets, put the keywords 'sale' 'buy' 'puppets' in the code (do a search for websites that discuss metadata in more detail). This is not so much important as the other stuff, but it will help.

That should start you off....

Thanks, NA!
Sara

No worries!

I actually thought of something else, but I've forgotten it now... :P

This site (Puppets and Stuff) always has a very high ranking in Google when searching for topics which have been discussed here. I run another (non-puppetry) site that is always at the top of Google searches for the very specific topic it was created to discuss - though that's probably because the site's name is a made-up word, so there aren't a lot of hits for it that aren't related to my site. Both this site and my other site get visited by web spiders like the Google-bots daily, sometimes more than once a day.

People used to say that the more links to your site from other web sites, the higher your ranking would be, but I have no idea if that's true. I don't know if that required people to actually click the links and visit your site or not.

People used to do link exchanges with other people to increase their traffic and rankings in the search engines, but I don't know if it actually helped with the rankings. I've heard people say lately that the top sites buy their ranking, but that sounds kind of cynical to me - though I'm no expert.

Anybody else here ever read or hear anything like that?

 

Ron G.

EDITED TO ADD:
Oops... I see that Na already mentioned link exchanges, as well as metadata in the "hidden" part of your HTML code. You can get other ideas doing a web search on rankings. RG

You can't buy a ranking I don't think: but people are more likely to buy a website if it is already ranked highly, because then they spend less money on advertising. The higher your page rank, the more you can sell your site for. (ie. Facebook would sell for millions, whereas my site would sell for maybe a couple of hundred dollars)

So long as your site is linked on other people's, it doesn't matter whether or not people click on the link; but of course, that's the aim

Don't forget Squidoo.com, It's free and really easy, provides a little bit of steady qualified traffic but more importantly google loves it.
The trick with squidoo is updating it regularly.