All Amazing Articles

Part 1 – Preparations

Introduction
Today the internet is very different to it used to be. Several years ago, if you made a website you were assured of visitors as there were so few sites on the internet. Now, with several hosting companies having over half a million web sites on their servers it is much harder to get the visitors. Just recently, the search engine Google announced it had information on over 2 billion web pages.

Luckily it is not all bad news. Today there are over 200 million people on the internet and thousands of people are getting connected every day. The main problem you will face is getting your site noticed above all the others because, even if you have the best site ever, nobody will know that until they visit it.

Where To Start
There are thousands of places and ways to publicize your site. Basically, you must think to yourself, “How do I find sites?” The first thing you are likely to think of is Search Engines. They are the first place you should publicize your site. Secondly, you probably follow links from other pages. This is a very important way, which we will cover in more detail later.

To publicize your site well, all you need to do is follow this tutorial. We cannot guarantee that your site will be very popular after this but you should certainly get enough visitors to make your site worthwhile.

Preparations
Something a lot of people don’t do right when publicizing their site is that they don’t prepare properly. Anyone can submit their site to a search engine but there is a lot to do before you do this.

First of all, make sure that you know what your website is about. Although this sounds silly, a lot of people find that they don’t really know a category their website could fit in (for example Webmaster Resources). You will need this once you start submitting to directories and link sites. If your site has many separate subjects, promote them one at a time.

The second thing you should write is a description of your site. This should be short, about 20-30 words. There are several things that are quite important about your description:

• Never write anything like “The best site on the internet” or “The coolest site around” because it probably isn’t and people aren’t fooled that easily
• Don’t Begin Each Word With A Capital Letter
• DON’T USE ALL CAPITALS
• Write your description in the 3rd person. For example don’t write “We offer several free services to help your business.” Instead write “Here you can get several free services to help your business.”

Once you have written your description, save it in a text file somewhere. You will need it later. Next you will need to come up with some keywords. These are the words which people will use when searching for your site. You should have about 20-40 of these. Type them into a text file separating them with commas. For example a site offering credit card processing for small businesses might have keywords like:

credit, card, small, business, low, cost, new, startups, processing, creditcard, company, companies, businesses

Here are some tips for your keywords:

• Put your 5 most important keywords first. It hasn’t been proved to increase your search engine ranking but some search engines have a limit to the number of keywords you use so you can make sure they are not cut off
• Never repeat a keyword. Search engines will consider this spamming and will not index your site
• Try to think of alternatives to some words. For example, in the keywords above, both the words business and company were used
• Include plurals of words in your keywords but don’t take out separate ones for them. For example, you wouldn’t take out the keyword company so that you could include the word busine
  sses

Save your keywords to a file as you will need them very soon.

Finally you should make sure you have a descriptive title for your site. An example of this is, instead of calling a site:

Football World

you could call it:

Football World – Teams, stats, results and match reports

This will help your search engine ranking and help people to understand what your site is about.

Meta Tags
The next thing you will need to do is create meta tags. These are a bit of code which goes at the top of your site. It will tell any search engines the description of your site and the keywords.

Creating your meta tags is easy. You can use our very own Meta Tag Creator (see related links). All you need to do is paste the description and keywords you wrote into the appropriate boxes. It will display your meta tags on screen and e-mail them to you for future reference. It will also tell you how to add them to your site.

What Now?
Now you are ready to start publicizing your site. In the next part we will show you how to submit your site to the search engines.

Part 2 – Search Engines

Introduction

In part 1 I showed you how to prepare for promoting your site. This involved writing a description and keywords for your site and changing them into META tags which you could add to your site so that be able to pick them up. This week I will show you site to the main search engines and how to try and engine ranking.

The Problems With Search Engines
Many years ago, when the Internet was just, starting to become popular, search engines did exactly what they were designed to do. They provided a place where you could search all the sites on the internet and get a list of all the best ones in your browser. Unfortunately, millions of sites have been submitted, some of them have no useful information at all. This means that, if you search for a subject of interest on a search engine you will get hundreds of thousands of results, and only about half of them are relevent to the query.

This, of course, causes even bigger problems for webmasters. Unless you are listed within the first 100 results for a search term, very few people will ever visit your site. This means that hundreds of web sites have been set up just to explain how to get a good rating on a search engine. But not everyone can be in the top 100 so don’t expect too much traffic from the search engines. If you are higly rated you will get a lot of visitors (some people get 40%-60% of their vistiors from the search engines).

I have found that, especially if a lot of sites have the same subject as you, you are very unlikely to get in the top 100 for a major search term, so try concentrating on a different, less popular one. Here is an example:

On Free Webmaster Help there is a tutorial explaining how to use PHP and MySQL together. Free Webmaster Help has no chance of being in the top 100 for search terms such as ‘webmaster resources’ or ‘how to build a site’ but does very well on searches for ‘php mysql tutorial’, and I have found that a great many of my visitors enter the site through the PHP/MySQL tutorial. This niche market is making up a great many of my visitors.

Search Engines And Directories
A common mistake people make is to get Search Engines mixed up with Web Directores. Web Directories are collections of sites which are organised into catagories. They are usually submitted and then looked at by a human before being allowed into the directory.

Search engines alre just a huge database of sites, descriptions and keywords which can be searched. They are collected by ‘Spiders’. These are pieces of software which visit a website and ’spider it’. This means that, they take the information from the META tags and then follow all the links on the page to find more pages. When you submit to a search engine you are asking the spider to vist your site

Getting Into A Search Engine
This is one of the easiest things to do badly but actually submitting your site to a search engine and gett,ing a good ranking is completely different. Your META tags play and important part here but so does the actual text of your page. Before you submit your site you might want to do the following as it sometimes improves search rankings:

Add keywords to your page. What this is is when you use the keywords from your Keywords and Description tag in your text. For example:

Title: Web Design International – Professional web design for businesses
Description: Web Design International offer competitively priced web design for medim and small businesses around the globe. You can have your page designed, hosted and a domain name set up and you can even have your web site in multiple languages
Keywords: web, design, site, make, international, translation, low cost, world, host, hosting, domain name, price, medium, small, business, company

Firstly you would start your page using something very like your description. Then you would follow this with more inf
ormation about your business. Several times in this you should include your major keywords like ‘web design’ ‘low cost’ ‘competitively priced’ ‘hosting’ and ‘domain name’. Don’t be tempted to keep repeating these words over and over again, though. Search engines will reject your site if they think you are trying to get a higher ranking this way.

Next you should make sure that you have a lot of links to the other parts of your site from the front page. This will help the search engine spiders to easily get to the rest of your site. On most search engines every single page on your site will appear if the correct keywords are searched for.

Submitting Your Site
Now you have prepared your site for the search engines it is time to start submitting it. The more search engines you submit to the better. The most important, though, is Google. This is because Google now provide the web page matches for Yahoo! and this is the most popular site on the web. Yahoo! is an extremely important place to publicize your site. Because of this there is a complete section dedicated to it int he next part as it is actually a directory.

You should submit to all the main search engines such as Google and AltaVista but if there are any specific search engines for your site then your should also submit your site to them (for instance music site search engines etc.)

If the search engine you are submitting to asks for your description and keywords, check that it is actually a search engine and not a directory (especially if it asks for a catagory). Some do ask for these, though. You can get them from the files you created last week and paste them into the form.

Part 3 – Directories

Introduction
In the last part I explained the difference between search engines and directories and how to add your site to a search engine effectively. In this part I will explain how to get your site listed in a directory and some tips on getting listed on Yahoo.

The Problems With Directories
Like search engines, directories have their problems. In the past, when the internet was small, directories were very effective at their job. As an example, Yahoo, the most popular site on the internet, started as two students’ list of their favorite sites. They published it on the internet and it was extremely popular.

Even now, a directory is a much better place to find what you want than a search engine. This is because, usually, every single site on a directory has been visited by a human. They check that a site is good quality and that it is being submitted to the correct category. This is excellent for users but it makes it very difficult for webmasters to get their sites listed.

This is mainly because there are so many sites listed it can take weeks to get your site added – or, in the case of Yahoo, sometimes never. People have tried to overcome this by trying to get normal people to sign up as a ‘guide’ or something similar, which means that you get to review the sites coming in. The most famous of these is the Open Directory Project. This can give a webmaster an easy, if not very ethical, way of getting into a directory.

Another problem with having human edited directories is that your site needs to be of a very high standard to be accepted. If it isn’t, the extremely busy reviewer will just take one quick look and then forget about it.

Submitting Your Site
Submitting your site to a directory is nearly as easy as submitting to a search engine. You just click ‘Add my Site’ and choose the category for it (more about this later). Then you usually give them your URL, e-mail address, and a description of your site. Keywords are rarely needed. Sometimes they will not ask for a description and will write it themselves.

Most major search engines have a directory as well (although most are provided by the Open Directory Project). There are also hundreds of specialist directories for different subjects (like 123 Webmaster.com for webmaster sites). If you would like to find one for your subject, take a look in the Yahoo directory.

Tips on Getting Listed on Yahoo (and others)
Getting listed on Yahoo is probably the best form of website promotion any webmaster can do. Being the most popular website on the internet, every single site which is listed gets hundreds of visits from it. If you are listed on Yahoo you can be quite sure that your site is going to get visitors.

Unfortunately Yahoo is nearly impossible to get into. Thousands of sites every day submit to be added and most of them are completely useless sites. Yahoo only have a limited staff and it will take months to get listed (if you actually get listed at all). So how can you increase your chances?

First of all don’t bother with all the spam and adverts that tell you that for ‘just’ $150 they will tell you the secret of getting on Yahoo. They don’t work.

As an example, once a newsletter for webmasters I read mentioned a ’secret e-mail address which you can use to get your site listed if you have tried several times’. The next week the same newsletter revealed that this e-mail address didn’t exist and that they had made it up completely as an experiment. The experiment showed that these companies’ schemes don’t work as, over the week, the newsletter’s editor had received several pieces of spam trying to sell him his own idea!

You can increase your chances of being reviewed, though, by following these guidelines (which also work on other search engines):

• Make sure you have a very good description

Find EXACTLY the right category for you. Smaller categories will give your site more chance of being clicked on and there will be less sites being submitted so you have more chance of being reviewed.

Although it won’t work on Yahoo, you can try the following to get your site listed on some directories. Go to the directory and apply to become a ‘guide’ or ‘editor’ for your section. If you get accepted you can then add your own site manually.

Part 4 – FFA Links Pages

Introduction
In part 3 I explained about directories and Yahoo! In this part I am going to focus on FFA Links pages. These are Free For All Links Pages, sites where anyone can add a link for free.

FFA Links – The Good and Bad Points
Some webmasters claim that FFA Links Pages are no use and that their bad points outweigh their good ones but I do not agree. I will show you why I think that it is worth submitting your site to them.

The first good point of being on a FFA Links Page is, of course, that there is a chance that someone will click on the link on the page to your site. Unfortunately, there are so many thousands of sites, big and small, who are submitting to these pages that your site has a very low chance of being clicked on, in fact some FFA Links Pages only keep links for a few weeks before deleting them as they have so many submissions.

There is one time, though, when your link has an extremely good chance of being clicked on. Sometimes only for a day, your link will be listed as a new link on the main page (or a major page) and at the top of your category. Most of the FFA Links pages are very popular and get thousands of visitors every day. In your first week you will get nearly all of your clicks and most of these will be in the first 24 hours.

The main reason why you should add your site to these pages is that Google includes the number of sites who link to you in its calculation of how high your site appears in the rankings. If you are listed on a FFA Links Page you will have another site linking to you, and your ranking will rise.

One major disadvantage of the FFA Links Pages is that they have realized that it is good for a webmaster to have a link on their page as they have so many visitors. Because of this they can request your e-mail address before you submit your site. They will then send you what is effectively spam (unsolicited e-mail). Although you can have your name removed from their mailing lists it is usually harder to do this than delete the e-mails.

Submitting Your Site
Submitting your site to a Free For All Links Page is a little more complex than adding your site to a directory or search engine. Unlike for search engines this is where mass submission tools become very useful.

Before you start, though, there is something very important you must do. Go to a free e-mail provider like Hotmail or Yahoo and set up a free e-mail account. This is very important because you do not want to use your main e-mail address when signing up because of the amount of e-mail you will receive from the FFA Links Pages.

Next go and find a good site submission tool. There will be links on many major webmaster sites (try our directory) or you can do a search. Try to find ones which offer the largest number of sites (usually over 1000) as you need to get into as many as possible to get a good number of hits. Don’t pay any attention to the search engines it says it will submit your site to. They don’t usually work and, if you have been following this tutorial, you will already have submitted your site.

Now you must fill in the form it provides with your sites name and URL and the e-mail address you set up. You may also need to provide a description or keywords, for which you should use your standard ones. Click submit and wait for the confirmation.

Other Sites
There are some FFA Links Pages which are not usually included in the site submission tools. These are usually of a slightly higher quality and they sometimes require to look at your site or a linkback from your site to add you. Some ones you should submit personally to are:

• Free.com
• FreebiesPlanet.com
• The Free Site
• FreakyFreddies.com
• iFreebies.com

Resubmitting Your Site
Now you are on some FFA Links Pages you should start getting some extra traffic to your site but, as I mentioned earlier, you will soon go down in the rankings and some sites will even drop your site. I would suggest that, at least once a month, you resubmit your site (possibly even using a different submission tool) so that you are back at the top again. Some FFA Links Pages will not allow this but it will all be automated and will not make any difference to the submission process.

Part 5 – Reciprocal Links

Introduction
In the last part I explained how to use Free For All Links Pages. In this part I will tell you about one of the most powerful ways of promoting your site. This one will require you to do some hard work but will pay off in the end.

How To Start
Before making some reciprocal links you should understand what they are. A reciprocal link is when you make a link to another website and they make a link back to your site. In this way you will each be able to benefit from each other’s traffic.

There is no ‘reciprocal linking Yahoo’ (although there are some links pages and directories who require a link back to them). You will actually have to find the sites to link to and contact the webmaster yourself regarding a link.

Before you start making links, though, you must be prepared. You should have at least one 468×60 pixel banner, one 88×31 pixel button and a short text link about your site, for example:

My Site – Information, links and communites for webmasters

Or something similar. It will be different depending on your site, for example someone selling computers might have:

The Computer Store – Great bargains on computer hardware and software

You should make a page on your website which has these links and the code used to add them to someone else’s site (you can copy it from your WYSIWYG editor’s HTML code window if you are using one). You must test this before putting it on the internet and make sure the code will point to your image from anywhere on the internet.

Write a little paragraph on this page inviting people to exchange links with you and give them an e-mail address to contact. Then link to it from your site.

You might also want to set up a ‘Links’ section of your site for you to put all your return links on.

Finding Partners
This is where the real work is. You have now got to go out and find link partners. To get the most out of link exchanges you must target the right sites. There are three things you should look for:

1. Similar but not identical content. For example, if you sell CDs you will want to exchange links with some bands and entertainment sites but don’t exchange links with another CD shop.
2. About the same size of site. For example, if your CD shop gets 10 visitors a week you should not try to exchange links with huge entertainment sites getting 10,000 visitors a day.
3. Sites which have other adverts and links on them. For example there would be no point in your CD shop trying to exchange links with a guitar manufacturer who have no banners or buttons on their site.

One excellent way to find sites is to search on the search engines for something to do with your site. Then start visiting the pages until you find one which looks like it fits all the criteria above. Now you can try and exchange links.

Exchanging Links
The first thing you should look for is a section on this site like the one on your site which asks for link exchanges (it could be called ‘Link To Us’. If you find it then choose one of the links and copy the code. Paste it into your site and then upload it. You have now linked to their site. Now you must contact them.

If they provide a form on the website to fill in then just fill it in and submit it. More often than not, though, you will need to e-mail the webmaster. This is an art in itself as you want to give the webmaster the right attitude. If they like the look of a link exchange they are more likely to put your link in a better place on their site. Send them an e-mail like this:

Dear <Name> (Try and find out the webmaster’s real name. Personal e-mails work better)

I have just visited your site and I think that the information about <information> would be of interest to my visitors. (Put something abou
t their site in here so that they realize it isn’t just a generic e-mail. If they are selling a product you could mention this instead.)

I have placed a link to your site at <link location> and I would appreciate it if you would link back to my site at <site URL>. You can use the following code:

<insert code>

(For this section include the URL of the page where they can find the link to your site. The URL of your site so that the webmaster can look at it and the code for the equivalent link to the one you have placed on your site. For example if you placed a text link to the site then offer the code for your text link.)

Thank You

<Your Name>
<Your E-mail>

This e-mail is just a sample and you should adapt it depending on the site you are linking to. Reciprocal linking requires a bit of thought. It’s not as easy as submitting to a search engine.

Maintaining Your Links
It is a good idea to visit the sites you have exchanged links with occasionally. There are two reasons for this. Firstly you should make sure that your link is still being displayed and if it isn’t e-mail the webmaster and ask why. Secondly it is sometimes a good idea to sign the guestbook or post a message in the other websites message board. This is not really essential but if you remember that a webmaster who likes you will place your link higher. Webmasters like feedback and message board messages so this might get your link placed higher.

If you have a lot of links it might be a good idea to make a database or spreadsheet listing them all. Include on it the URL of the site you have exchanged links with, the type of link and any other information. Every few months all you have to do is run through this database and check all the links etc.

Part 6 – Writing For Promotion

Introduction
In part 5 I showed you how to exchange links with other webmasters to increase your site’s popularity. In this part I will show you how to promote your site in more subtle ways. Basically, you can increase awareness of your site by including references to it in other ways.

E-Mail Signatures
E-mail is the main reason most people use the internet. Knowing this is very important as it provides a whole new way of promoting your site. Before explaining how to get visitors through e-mail I will make something very clear: NEVER SPAM! Sending spam (unsolicited e-mail) is a very bad idea. You will never have a popular website if you do it and you are more likely to create a bad impression than get extra visitors.

You can, though, benefit from e-mail by including an ‘advert’ for your site in every single e-mail you send. Think about that for a minute, most people send many, many e-mails every week and if every e-mail you send has an advert on it you are certainly going to get some extra visitors.

An example of this in action is Microsoft’s Hotmail. It is the most popular free e-mail provider on the internet with tens of millions of users. How did they do it? Signatures. Every single e-mail sent from Hotmail has:

Get your own free e-mail at www.hotmail.com

at the bottom of it. This caused thousands of people who received these messages to sign up. With no extra expense or work, Hotmail gained thousands, if not millions, of users.

You can do your own version of this, too. It is called adding an e-mail signature. This is a few lines after your name to give information to the reader. You can include your e-mail address, website address, ICQ/AIM number, or anything you like (in fact a lot of people have amusing signatures). For example here is my signature file:

David Gowans
webmaster@gowansnet.com
ICQ# ICQ NUMBER HERE

http://www.gowansnet.com
Web Design, Free Webmaster Help
and much more – Gowansnet has
everything you need for the internet.

As you can see from this, I provide all my contact information and a quick summary of what my website is about. This is sent on every e-mail I write (although I have several variations of it) and, without any extra work, promotes my site.

You could just type all this out every time but there is an easier way. Most e-mail programs offer a signature option. This allows you to define one or more signatures which you can add to your messages with one click (or can even be added automatically).

A few things to remember about your signature file:

• Keep it short. Write no more than 5 lines about your website.
• DON’T USE ALL CAPITALS
• Don’t try to make pictures out of keyboard characters, they will not display properly on all programs
• Include the http:// in front of your web address. This will make a clickable link in most e-mail software.

Newsgroups and Forums
There are two ways to promote your site through newsgroups and forums (message boards). Both only require a little bit of work and can be very effective.

Firstly, you can promote your website by contributing to the discussions and including your e-mail signature on the posting. This will have the same effect as sending an e-mail except there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of people reading each message. This is an effective way of promoting your site.

Another way you can get extra visitors by using a newsgroups or forum is by referring people to your website for more information. This only works with some websites (mainly ones providing information/tutorials etc.). You must be careful, though, not to make the mistake of spamming the newsgroup or forum. This is when you post a message just to promote your website (or an advert for a product
etc.) with no real purpose. This is nearly as bad as spamming by e-mail.

You should try to get well known in one or two forums or newsgroups. Don’t only promote your site in postings but try to reply to some with information, not just giving a URL for your site. This will increase your credibility and make people more likely to visit your site.

One important thing to remember, though is that you should never just reply to a message with a URL. Include even a small bit of text. For example instead of just using a URL put a minimum of something like:

I think that you would find this page interesting:
SITE URL
I hope this is of some help to you.

Try to point users to the exact page for the information they are looking for. They will be much more likely to visit if they think that they can get the information they want without having to search through your site.

Writing Articles
A very good way of promoting your site, and one which is not widely used, is writing articles for other websites and newsletters. Newsletters are actually the best place to do this and it is a totally free way of promoting your site.

Firstly, you will need to find a newsletter which is about the same subject as your site and that you can write a short article for. Sign up to this newsletter and read it for a few issues to get an idea of what sort of information they publish.

Next you will need to write your article. You should try and write it in the same style as is used by the newsletter you are submitting to. To increase your chance of being included you should format your article correctly. Write it in plain text and place an enter at the end of each line. Lines should be shorter than 75 characters.

A good idea when writing articles is to try not to promote your site directly in the article. People will like and trust you more if it looks like you are writing the article to help them, not to promote your site.

So where do you get the free promotion from then? Well, if you provide an article to a newsletter (or website) for free then you will get a byline in return. This is a few lines after the article which credit it to you and advertise your site. For example, here is my byline:

Tutorial by David Gowans of http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com – Tutorials, articles and links to help you to build your own web site.

The next thing you have to do is send an e-mail to the newsletter editor (or the newsletter’s contact address) with your article and byline attached (either in the e-mail or as a text file). Tell them that you are offering this article for them to use and that they can use it for free if they include your byline.

If you get an article placed in a major newsletter you will certainly get some extra visitors. Some newsletters are sent to tens of thousands of people and, if you have a good byline, you should get quite a few new visitors.

Part 7 – Banner & Button Exchanges

Introduction
In part 6 I showed you how to promote your site by writing e-mails and articles. In this, the final part, I will show you how you can benefit from banner and button exchanges.

What Is An Exchange?
The most common type of exchange is a banner exchange so I will concentrate on this first. Basically a banner exchange is a large system where you can have your banner displayed on other sites.

You sign up to the exchange and give them the URL of your banner. Then you receive some code to put on your site. This code will display another banner from the exchange on the site and log the view. You will have an account where all the times a banner is viewed on your site is logged. These are known as banner impressions.

For every impression you earn you will be given a number of impressions on another site. This is usually done at a ratio of something like 2:1 (for every 2 banner impressions you display on your site you receive 1 impression of your banner on another site). This sounds a bit unfair but the site running the exchange needs a lot of bandwidth and resources and the spare impressions are used to display advertising banners. You may find rates as good as 10:9, though, where only 1 in 10 banners are taken by the exchange owners.

Why Should I Join an Exchange?
Some people wonder why a banner exchange is worthwhile if you only receive 1 banner impression for every 2 you display. You could be using this space on your website for paid advertising, making you money.

The main reason for doing an exchange, though, is that you are getting for free what could cost you a lot of money, advertising on another website. You are almost sure to benefit from an exchange, especially if you can design a very effective banner.

Another reason for joining an exchange is that you do not always have do give up your banner or prime advertising space. It is because of this that many new exchanges have been set up dealing in button and box advertising. These are much smaller and can be placed in navigation bars or just at the bottom of pages.

Banners, Buttons and Boxes
With all the different options for exchanges, what are they all. Banners are the standard 468×60 pixel images you see at the top and bottom of most websites. They are by far the most popular way of advertising on the web.

Buttons are 88×31 pixel images. Being very small, they are usually found under navigation bars or in clusters at the bottom of pages. They are becoming more popular as a method of advertising.

Boxes are usually 120 pixels wide and can vary in height. They are usually found in navigation bars or next to the banner at the top of a page. They are not particularly popular way of having an exchange but are an excellent form of advertising.

Exchange Tips
There are literally hundreds of exchange programs on the web, going from large networks, with millions of member websites, right down to tiny exchanges with a few members. Their display ratios vary greatly also, sometimes even being a 1:1 exchange!

Finding the right exchange program for your website can be difficult but it is usually better to go for a specific exchange which is related to your website because you are likely to get a much higher click through rate (the chances of your banner being clicked on (usually around 1%)). With the big exchanges, although you are categorized, you have less of a chance of having your banner clicked on.

Another useful tip is to get as many impressions as possible. Even if you think that your advertising space is too valuable to give up you are never going to get a decent amount of visitors through the exchange unless you get a lot of impressions. Put the code on every page of your site so that you get as many as possible.

If you don’t have one already, you should get a counter or tracker which tells you
the referring URL of your visitors (the site they have come from). Sitemeter is an excellent option. Although, this will allow you to see where your visitors have come from it will not tell you if they came through the banner exchange. If a site appears that you don’t think you have a link on, visit it. If you see a banner or button from the exchange you are a member of then the visitor probably came through the exchange. Most exchanges also offer statistics that will tell you the number of impressions and clicks you have received.

Finding Exchanges
Finding exchanges is actually the easiest part of using an exchange effectively. You can just do a search on a search engine. Another way of finding them is by looking at the banners and buttons on other people’s sites. These will sometimes have a link under them to the exchange. You can also move your mouse over the button. The URL displayed in the status bar will tell you where you can find the exchange.

What Now?
After these 7 parts of the promotion tutorial you should have a very good idea of how to promote your site. Now you should just continue the promotion process, as if you stop your visitor numbers will fall. If you work hard you can be assured of having a popular site.

You must not forget, though, to keep developing your site and adding new content to make visitors want to come back again.

Source: http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/

\\ tags: Site Promotion