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 10.03.00
Well, another week has passed and I am here again to help you get
a boost in your traffic. First I would like to add a little personal
note to today's issue. Usually I don't do much on the weekends
except go to classes, but this weekend I decided to go to a movie.
It just so happens that "Remember The Titans" was starting and
displaying some interest in seeing it I thought I'd go. Well I'll
have to tell you I wasn't disappointed. If you are going to see just
one movie this week go see this one, you also won't be disappointed.
It has to be one of the best movies I have ever seen.
For those of you not familiar with this movie (don't worry I won't ruin it for anyone) I'll give you the premise of the movie. Based on a true story, the setting is a city in Virginia during the early seventies, a local high school is going to be integrated for the first time and the football program of the school is the main focus. Now as promised, we are going to talk about how signing guestbooks can help you promote your site. I have spent a lot of time researching this little known part in improving your rankings with those search engines that use link popularity to determine how a site ranks in the keyword results. Sincerely Patrick Stoddard, PromoteNewz Editor 
This is a very good site to find a long list of places to apply for
awards for your site. Check them out and apply for a few awards, you
never know unless you try.
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I know you're saying, how can signing guestbooks help me promote my
site? Let's consider that a large portion of the Internet is made
up of people's personal pages, and a good majority of them have a
guestbook or two. Now, consider that with each guestbook that
you happen to come across you can add a few personal comments, but
what else are you getting? Other than the usual name and email
address, you also have the opportunity to provide a link to your web
site and that's where the promotion comes into play. With search
engines starting to lean heavily upon link popularity, wouldn't it
be smart to put a link to your site in as many places as you could?
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Let's take a look at why link popularity is such an important factor. To take a quote from WebProNews "The important shift has been toward Link Popularity. Getting as many links of good sites linking to yours is an important point with AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Google (very important), Go, Inktomi, and Northern Light." (-If you would like to read the full article this quote came from you can find it here. ) If you would like to find out where your link popularity stands, you can enter your URL into one of the search engines listed above with the word link and a colon before the http. Here is an example: link:http://www.wizardsdesign.com. Now I'm not telling you that you will get an incredible boost in your search engine ranking by blindly putting your link onto other peoples guestbooks. There are, of course, other rules that the engines follow but every little bit helps. Let's consider my own web site. When I run a search on AltaVista to check on how many links there are to my site out there, about fifty percent of them are links to others guestbooks. These links show the search engine spiders that your site has some popularity, and in turn, increases your rankings in a search. Other than giving you more link popularity for the search engines to spider, you also get another place to tell people about how special your web site is. All you need is to include a small one-liner in the comments section that will make people think, "Hey! Maybe I should check this site out". Most of us, when we are searching for ways to promote our site, will follow other links to sites that we feel can be helpful to our own. Or maybe we are just looking for a little information, I know I will follow a link to a site that I think will have the information I'm looking for. Be careful though, if you make it look too much like an ad, no one will consider following the link to your web site. Now you can see that a guestbook can be a good way for you to promote your site. There are, of course, some Netiquette issues you should follow and know before you start and you should do a little research into how the search engines use link popularity to rank sites. All in all, using guestbooks to promote your site is a good idea and a great method to boost your traffic.
Patrick Stoddard is the senior editor in the technology department for iEntry Inc. You can find more great e-zines about topics like networking, web site design and web site promotion written by me at the iEntry Network |
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