Marketing Sites With Slogans

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

With the constant changes happening in the adult industry webmaster need to look towards alternative ways of marketing not only their own sites but the sites of their sponsors. This is where something that we have all seen daily can come in handy, what is this marketing tool? Simple, Slogans.

Slogans – What Are They?

A slogan is a short, memorable advertising phrase for example, ‘Just Do it’ – Nike. By utilizing a slogan on your site you are not only giving your surfers something other by which they can remember your site by but, you are actively building up your brand which, in turn, can mean more repeat traffic and ultimately, more sales.

How To Make A Slogan.

So now you know what a slogan is how do you go about creating one? Simple, you should think of something short, usually three to four word slogans work the best again, as with the Nike example above ‘Just Do it’ its short, sweet and memorable, try to make your own slogan fit within this guideline and you are half way done. Another thing that you may like to consider is making your slogan practical or humorous, something witty can often stay in a persons mind a lot longer than something serious, play on peoples memory and ensure they remember your brand.

Where To Use Your Slogan.

Now that you have thought up a slogan which you feel will work on your traffic and sites you need to consider the places where you can use it for maximum impact, the most obvious place to use your slogan is on your site design, either at the top or the bottom of your pages, make it clear and more importantly, make it stand out. In addition, if you have any banners or buttons created, ensure you utilize the slogan on those creatives, the goal is to have your slogan seen by as many people, as quickly as possible.

Article written by Lee

Resource Forums – The Changing Face Of The Adult Industry

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

Online adult webmaster resource sites are becoming a thing of the past instead, we have witnessed a new breed of resource site being birthed in the adult industry, the resource forum. It seems like almost every major adult sponsor and webmaster has their own resource forum as of the current time however, what is making these forums stand out from one another and, more importantly, can you actually learn anything valuable from them.

Webmaster Resource Forums.

Back in the day there were only a handful of resource forums made available for adult webmasters to educate themselves further, these included such sites as Ynot Masters, Netpond (then The Condom Chronicles) and Porn Resource, however, to date there are no less than 200 webmaster resource forums floating around the internet for adult webmasters to post on.

With this amount of resource forums available to webmasters it seem impossible that many webmasters cant be making a profit however, upon closer inspection a disturbing trend seems to be taking place.

Resource Forums – Webmasters Posts.

With the sudden surge of webmaster resource forums in the last 6-12 months there is one thing that is apparent, most of, if not all of the resource forums to have spawned during this time have one thing in common, the webmasters who post on them, often, these webmasters are posting for a single reason, to get other webmasters to click on their signatures, nothing more, nothing less.

It would appear that the adult industry is heading towards a meltdown of the adult resource forums, with more and more webmasters grabbing free scripts such as phpbb to load onto their domain and launch their own resource forum it would appear at first glance as if the industry is a thriving community of webmasters all willingly helping each other out however, this is not the case, instead, we find post after post duplicated across multiple resource forums in the effort of making the longest thread, getting the most page views and, ultimately, getting the most signature clicks.

Webmaster Resources.

So with all of this going on what’s happening to the actual resource sites? Well they are still around and, they are still being used however, these have now become second place to the message forum, often as mentioned above, webmasters will post the same message on several message boards and get several replies of exactly the same answer from exactly the same people. Whilst this in itself is a good thing (the exchange of information) my personal feelings are that we are heading towards an excess of resource forums and, whilst communication is needed, there also becomes a point at which you can get an information overload, new webmasters entering the adult industry will see the variety of forums made available to them and start posting however, in doing so they forget the one thing that they actually should be doing, working.

Webmaster Resource Forums – Overview.

I think within the next 12 months we are going to see one of two things start to happen, either the resource forum phenomenon will continue as it is doing now or, the resource forum will become a thing of the past whilst a new medium takes its place, one thing is certain though all these webmasters posting on forums to get sig views and post counts are not doing the one thing they should be, making money and, this becomes all to apparent after watching the same old posts, make the rounds to the same old forums time and time again.

Resource forums can be great help to the adult webmaster however, at the same time, they can also become a webmasters biggest downfall, remember why resource forums are there, to help you when you need it and to socialize when you have to, at what point to do you stop getting help and start becoming a post whore? Well only you can answer that question.

Article written by Lee

Redirecting To A Different Page Using JavaScrip

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Scripts | Response: 0

There are times when a simple JavaScript redirection from one page to another can come in handy and, the following JavaScripting will enable you to do this.

When a page contains this javascript, it will be redirected to another page that you specify in the “window.location=”. You can change the number of refresh seconds by changing the “move()’,1000 to the number of seconds you’d like.

Example:

1000 = 1 second
2000 = 2 seconds
3000 = 3 seconds

Place this JavaScript code between the <head> and </head> tags

<script language=”JavaScript”>
<!–hide from old browsers
var time = null
function move() {
window.location = ‘http://www.yourdomain.com’
}
//–>
</script>

Place this JavaScript code in your <body> tag

<body onload=”timer=setTimeout(‘move()’,1000)”>

You should now have a page that will redirect to a new url when it loads in the surfers browser window.

Article written by Lee

10 Ways To Promote Your Site

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As we all know, getting productive traffic to your site can be a long and tedious task of course, there are ways to generate ‘optimized’ traffic at very little cost and time involvement. Below are just a few suggestions about how you can increase traffic to your
site and, inevitably, there are hundreds of different variations of these that will work for your site, I think the key to getting a successful traffic source is dependant on how much effort you put into it and, if you work hard and play little, you will reap the benefits tenfold.

1. Create an email discussion list. The list should be related to your web site’s subject. Place your ad on all posts and it will remind people to visit your site.

2. Prove your site is a bargain. Add a lot of free stuff to your offer or, if you’ve sold the product for a higher price before, show them the difference or, show them how much your competitors charge.

3. Make your web site more useful. Sell ad space, generate hot leads, answer visitor questions, offer free content, be news friendly, etc.

4. Make the most of each visitor. Sometimes your price is to high. You should provide a variety of similar products at different price ranges.

5. Test and redesign your banner ads till you get your desired click through rate. Once you do, join many banner exchanges and buy ad space.

6. Use holidays as a reason to get free publicity. Write a press release or article about the current holiday. It’ll have a high chance of being published.

7. Utilize the free content on the internet. Publish one article on a single web page and your main web site link then upload it as a doorway page.

8. Test your new products on the bottom of your home page. You don’t want to take away hits from your best selling products until others are proven.

9. Make commissions without joining an affiliate program. Just propose a joint venture offer to web sites that don’t have affiliate programs.

10. Persuade other web sites to link to yours. It can improve your search engine ranking. Just offer them something of value in return.

Article written by Lee.

Marketing And Building For Women Sites

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Promotion, WebDesign | Response: 0

When marketing sites to the female surfer, just how different does the building process become, are there things that you should leave out or add in that you usually wouldn’t for the male adult arena? Hopefully this article will explain this in some more depth.

I have broken this article down into specific segments that should be considered when building your for women sites these are as follows:

Sub Niches

As with every other niche in the adult industry the For Women market has their own individual sub niches. These vary from young guys to older men, couples, stories, fantasy, bondage, cartoons and a whole plethora of other niches all of which are to many mention here. Your chosen niche should reflect in the content you will be using and, more importantly, the content of the pay site to where you are sending the surfer. This is the best time to get a feel for your content and, it alleviates some hardships later on when you realize you have built a site full of hairy guys, only to realize the only site you can send them to is a gay bear site, not the most appealing site for a female surfer to join.

Where Do You Want To Go With This Site?

Are you looking to create a free site for the sole reason of driving traffic to your surfer trap, are you going to make a free site in order to make a sale, are you building a site for an AVS system? These are all decisions that you need to make before you start the building process, planning at this stage will reap its benefits later on. You should also consider the sponsor that you will utilize on the site, are you going to use all pay sites, sex toy sponsors or, will you use a mix, you need to plan this well as you do not want to end up with a site where all of the sponsors you are using end up negating the values of each other.

What Type Of Female Are You Looking To Attract?

Do you want to attract female surfers looking for erotica or, do you want to attract female surfers who are after something else, take a look at some of the female traffic sites, see what each of the sites presented to you offer their female surfers, can your match or better what these sites offer and, more importantly, can you offer something that the female surfer is likely to want?

Content Is King.

As with every other niche you need to pre-select the content that you will use on this site, do you have something that can be used and, used in such a way it generates interest from the surfer, if you are using stories on your site are they appealing, how do the men in the images look? All of these need to be taken into consideration before you start to use your content, if you do not have any content you need to choose some from one of the for women content providers, keep in your budget, make sure the content is right for your needs, not to hardcore but, not to softcore, keep it simple and erotic.

Layout

When creating your galleries be creative, anyone can stick up a 10 pic gallery but it takes a true marketer to place creative text on the page, provide the female surfer with some additional information, make it up if you have to, tell them the model is called Brian, tell them his stats, let them know some more information about the model. This will be more likely to get the women who visit your galleries / sites interested in both the images and, more importantly, the erotic side of the model you are using, if the model is available inside your sponsor pay site, you will more than likely find that the female surfer will want to get more information about the model out of sheer interest alone if nothing else.

Choose Your Marketing Strategies.

Will you be using banners, text links or, other media to sell your for women sponsor? We all know the proliferation of banners on the internet have made them less ‘click-able’ than what they used to be. Use some ‘erotic’ text over banners or, even use text on its own.

Keywords And Relevancy

Keep your smack talk pleasant but to the point, the majority of female surfers would prefer to click on a link that said ‘Steve erotically caressed his penis against her cheeks’ than, ‘Steve shot his hot creamy load all over her face’ see the difference? one is sensual and erotic the other is pure porn, female surfer are mainly erotica driven not porn driven.

Speak To Another Webmaster / Web Mistress.

The for women niche is still relatively untapped at the moment, the people who are catering for this niche know the niche, most of them are female themselves and, as such, will know what works and what does not. How would you speak to a woman you met in public? There is a difference between speaking to a ‘guy’ and speaking to a female. Let this difference also show in your site too. If you have no idea how to market to women, ask one, you can find a message board dedicated to female webmasters at http://www.femalewebmasters.com and i am sure one of the posters there would be happy to help you out.

Design And Practice.

You now have the basics set you should now move onto designing you layout, keep your design simple, keep it neat, don’t over do the ‘female’ aspect of the site, over use of pinks, pastels and similar colors can undo all the preparation work you have just done, be subtle, know you are designing a site for the female surfer but keep it generalize, soft tones in color are not always the best way to use colors. Pink is not always for girls, blue is not always for boys, shades of pastel blue has just as much of a feminine effect as pinks and reds. Choose your color scheme wisely and this will pay off big time.

However you decide to develop your site you should ensure that it melts together nicely, use contrasting colors for your banners, background and text, make sure the content is not too gay looking and that the female surfer knows the site was built specifically for her but, also ensure you have the links visible in case you get surfers from other niches at your site, don’t do yourself out of money just because this is a for women site this is probably the only element that crosses over between niches be they straight, gay or in fact, for women.

Article written by Lee.



Domain Name Renewals – The Basics

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

As an adult webmaster there is one thing that we all own which we build our businesses on, a domain name and, with this comes the responsibility to ensure that as long as we are running our business from any given domain that we ensure they are constantly under our control this is where domain name renewsl come into play.

Domain Name Registration Periods.

Almost all reputable domain name registrars will allow you to purchase a domain for anywhere between one and ten year periods. Many webmasters however only choose to register their domains for one year at a time and this, is where many webmaster can run into problems with their domains. More often than not webmasters will either forget to renew their domain names completely or, are not aware that they are even coming up for renewal. For this reason it is usually best to ensure that you register your domains for a minimum period of two years, this gives you a good time frame to start using the domain as well as ensuring you have enough funds available by the time the domain name comes due for renewal.

How To Stay On Top Of Your Renewals.

The simplest way to ensure that you keep on top of the domain names you own and when they are due for renewal is to keep a written document detailing as much information as possible about your domains, this document should include information such as the domain name itself, the registrar you used to register your domain name, the cost of the domain name and, most importantly, where the domain is pointing to, the period of registration and, the date when the domain needs to be renewed. By having this information readily available and, by keeping this document up to date with each new domain name purchase you should be able to ensure that no matter when your domain/s become due for renewal that you are on the ball with paying the domain name renewal fees.

Domain Name Renewals Overview.

Regardless of when you register a domain name the one way you can be sure to be the owner of the domain for years to come is to ensure that you keep accurate, detailed records of each domain name purchase, whether you keep this written on a calendar, on a piece of paper or, somewhere else, you should make part of your monthly routine checking this document and making sure that the domains you own are all fully working and, more importantly, are fully paid up.

Article written by Lee

Adult Employment Vacancies

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Employment | Response: 0

For some the prospect of being able to work for another company online is something that they may ultimately want to pursue however, just how do you go about finding work for one of the many adult companies and, more importantly, how can you ensure that you have a better chance of being hired for the job once you find the position you would like to have at the company?

Online Adult Employment – Job Types.

Working in the adult industry can take many forms however, the most commonly perceived adult industry job is that of a model but, what about other online job vacancies such as graphics designer, marketing manager, sales director, and webmaster support representative, just how do you find out what companies are hiring and more importantly, what adult employment vacancies they have.

Adult Employment Agencies.

For many webmasters the chances of finding employment in the adult industry at a ‘regular’ online employment agency such as monster.com may seem impossible however, that said, many of the larger companies have realized the value of the mainstream employment agencies and, as such are now advertising on these sites for their staff but where else can you look? Well there are actually several adult industry employment sites that adult webmasters can look at to find their ideal job for example Adult Staffing, Sexy Jobs and, Adult Help Wanted in addition to several smaller sites operated by companies such as Cybererotica.

Improving Your Employment Chances.

So now you know where to look for adult employment opportunities what can you do to ensure you have a greater chance of being hired? Well as with the mainstream bricks and mortar job market having a good curriculum vitae (CV) can be a good start, ensure you keep your CV regularly updated and that it contains pertinent information for the type of job vacancy you are looking for in addition, often the first method of contact you will make with these potential employers will be via email or cover letter, make sure that you spend some time to write a letter that is not only noticeable but, interesting and, more importantly, grammatically correct. Demonstrate in this first stage of contact with your potential future adult employer that you take pride in your work and, you might just get bumped to the top of the ‘must see’ applicants.

Adult Jobs – Overview.

Many webmasters forget that there is more to the online adult industry than being able to party with the best of us and, whilst this does form a chunk of the industry overall it is not conducive of you further enhancing your online career, take the time to investigate all of the avenues available to you and, most importantly, make sure you choose a job that you not only want to do but one that you will enjoy, your reputation is the one thing that a potential adult employer will take into consideration, if you have had several previous jobs all lasting for short periods of time, it wont look as good to them as if you have only had a couple of jobs for a lengthier time frame. Most of all remember that whenever you contact a company looking for employers, make sure you are prepared and professional even if it is just sending them a quick email asking for further information.

Article written by Lee.

Using .htaccess Effectively

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The .htaccess file is an ASCII text document that can be placed in any directory on your site. It can be used to control access to files and directories, and customize some server operation in your site. A .htaccess file can be created in any word processor but must be saved as text only. You must use FTP software in ASCII mode to upload or edit your .htaccess file. For the examples provided here, place the .htaccess file in your root directory.

There are a variety of functions that you can control using .htaccess some of the more useful of these are explained below:

Custom Error Messages.

Add the following to the .htaccess file::

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

After “ErrorDocument” specify the error code, followed by a space, and then the path and filename of the .html file you would like to be displayed when the specified error is generated, each specific error code is detailed below with the recommended codes to be used in the .htaccess file in bold :

200 OK
206 Partial content
301 Document moved permanently
302 Document found elsewhere
304 Not modified since last retrieval
400 Bad request
403 Access forbidden
404 Document not found
408 Request timeout
500 Internal server error
501 Request type not supported

Using the codes above your error section of the .htaccess file should look like this:

ErrorDocument 301 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 400 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 403 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 501 /notfound.html

Redirect to a Different Folder.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/oldfolder(.*)$ /newfolder/$1 [R]

This redirects the user from /oldfolder/anyfile.html to /newfolder/anyfile.html, when the .htaccess file is uploaded to the otherwise empty “/oldfolder” directory.

Denying User Access.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
deny from 000.00.00.
deny from 000.000.000.000
allow from all
</Limit>

This is an example of a .htaccess file that will block access to your site to anyone who is coming from any IP address beginning with 000.00.00 and from the specific IP address 000.000.000.000 . By specifying only part of an IP address, and ending the partial IP address with a period, all sub-addresses coming from the specified IP address block will be blocked. You must use the IP addresses to block access, use of domain names is not supported

Redirect a Machine Name.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
# Rewrite Rule for machine.domain-name.net
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} machine.domain-name.net $
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !machine/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ machine/$1

This will redirect requests for the machine name machine.domain-name.net to the directory machine on the site domain-name.net.

Different Default Home Page.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex filename.html

Then a request for http://domain-name.net/ would return http://domain-name.net/filename.html if it exists, or would list the directory if it did not exist.

To automatically run a cgi script, add the following to the .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex /cgi-local/index.pl

This would cause the CGI script /cgi-bin/index.pl to be executed.

If you place your .htaccess file containing the DirectoryIndex specification in the root directory of your site, it will apply for all sub-directories at your site.

Preventing Hot Linking.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

# Rewrite Rule for images
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} <URL of page accessing your domain>
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://<same as above URL>

You would replace the <URL of page accessing your domain> above with the domain name and path of the page that is referring to your domain. For example: www.theirdomain.com/users/mypage/

The RewriteCond directive states that if the {HTTP_REFERER} matches the URL that follows, then use the RewriteRule directive. The RewriteRule directive will redirect any reference back to the referring web page.

Using the above you should, safely be able to publish your sites on the internet knowing that you will not be privy to bandwidth thieves via hotlinking and also, that you will not lose any traffic through pages that are ‘not found’.

Article Written By Lee

Writing Your Sales Text – Some Facts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Writing | Response: 0

Do you know the difference between writing sales text for print advertising i.e. magazines and, writing sales talk for websites?

Well some of these differences will go against your intuition however, these differences are based on how people read specific items.

Where Do Eyes Go First When Your Page Loads?

Contrary to what most webmasters think it may not always be towards the thumbnails and banners on your page instead, surfers eyes will more than likely go to the first few lines of text on the page therefore, your first chance at making a sale before the surfer starts to burn your bandwidth is to have some enticing text on any site or page you build. Another reason why learning to write good text links can benefit you long term.

Also, as most surfers will only look at a page for between three and fifteen seconds before they decide whether they want to stay on the site they are at or close it this now starts to question webmasters use of heavy graphics on their sites, if a graphic takes three to four seconds to load you have just lost valuable sales time on your site.

How Much Of Your Copy Do Users Actually Read?

On average surfers will read about 75% of the length of any given page. Again, this is good news because it now means we can draw our surfers attention tot he ‘important’ sections of our sites by using headlines and bullet points to make them stand out. Also, this means that, given surfers will read only the first 75% of any page that the bottom half of your pages may not be as important as what was first believed.

Why Do Most Banner Ads Produce Poor Click-Through Rates?

Again as with any advertising media there is only a specific time frame that anyone will look at something, in this case it has been found that the vast majority of surfer will spend a mere 1.25 seconds looking at a banner which, is about enough time to read say 5 words based on the average college students reading time of 350 words a minute.

Therefore, banners which are animated and can take up to 5 seconds to get all the information across may in effect be completely worthless on our sites. More bad news for webmasters who have fancy animations and the likes on our pages.

Why Is Reading Online More Frustrating Than Reading Print?

Did you know that reading text on a computer screen can cause your reading ability to slow by up to 25% in some cases? This means that over inflating pages with text heavy content may actually aggravate the surfer instead of draw there attention! But, how can we stop this from potentially losing us a sale? Simple here are a few suggestions.

Rather than having one long continuous stream of text have several smaller one or two line paragraphs of text.

Use headlines to summarize what you are telling the surfer for example, if you sponsor has free trials tell them in bold lettering ‘Free Trials’ you get the point across and, you may draw their attention to click on the text.

Are Your Web Page Users Not Getting The Whole Picture?

Can surfers ‘scan’ your website? Lets look back at the above figures, 75% of the page gets read, banners have an attention span of only 1.25 seconds on average, that’s not much time for a surfer to look at your pages.

I think that would probably explain the reason why surfers tend to ‘scan’ our sites and only concentrate on the free images, how many of us actually take the time to read word for word EVERYTHING on a page?

I know I hardly do I just sit there and scan the page for things that draw me into the text or site. This is true again for surfers in fact, estimated figures show that roughly 21% of surfers actually spend the time to read every single word on any site meaning the other 79% only scan through our sites this again, cuts down our marketing capabilities dramatically making it more important to have headlines and well laid out pages highlighting the part we want our surfer to look at, namely, our sponsor links.

If we do not do this we are in effect only making 21% of our marketing efforts count again, taking away from our profits. That’s a huge chunk of our surfers we are losing out on gleaming a sale from.

What do all of the above figures tell us? Simple, we need to keep our pages quick loading, concise and more importantly unique, we need to draw our surfers to the specific areas that we want them to go to first and, in the process we should start to make more money from each of our sites.

Article written by Lee

Why Cant I Get Indexed By The Search Engines?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

Unfortunately, this is an all too common question. If it makes you feel any better, you’re not the only one frustrated about the length of time it takes to be indexed, or the many pitfalls involved. It often takes anywhere from two days to as much as six months to be listed on a search engine. For example, last month Excite finally updated its index for the first time since last August! Luckily, Excite is the most extreme case lately, but waiting several weeks to a month can also be extremely frustrating especially when your livelihood depends partly on these search engines.

The Web Position Submitter report will give you current time estimates for each engine so you’ll know what to expect. However, an engine at any time could choose to delay their indexing beyond the “norm” for maintenance or other reasons. On the flip side, you could get lucky and submit just a couple days before an engine does a complete refresh of their database. Therefore, submission times can never be an exact science since we’re all ultimately at the mercy of the engine.

If you’ve submitted your site and have waited the estimated time to be indexed and there’s still no listing, what do you do now?

Here are 16 tips that should help you solve this problem:

1. First, be sure you’re not already indexed but just don’t know it. Unfortunately, none of the major engines are kind enough to e-mail or notify you as to if and when you’ve been indexed.

The method to determine if a page or domain has been indexed varies from one engine to another, and in many cases, it’s difficult to tell for sure. Never assume that you’re not indexed just because you searched for a bunch of keywords and you never came up in the first few pages of results. You could be in there but buried near the bottom.

In addition, it’s not very practical to check the status of a number of pages on each major engine each week. Fortunately, Web Position has a URL verification feature in the Reporter that makes this process much easier. Each time you run a mission, it will report which URLs exist and do not exist in each engine. If you’re using Web Position and are not finding your URLs after submitting, be sure to see this page for common pitfalls to watch out for:

http://www.webposition.com/urlnotfoundhelp.htm

2. Make sure you have uploaded the pages to your site before submitting them. This one seems obvious, but submitting a page that does not exist or submitting with a subtle typo in the URL is a goof we might all make at one time or another. If you’re using Web Position’s Submitter, there’s a checkbox on tab 2 that forces Web Position to verify that all your URLs are valid before submitting them.

3. If you have information inside frames, that can cause problems with submissions. It’s best if you can create non-framed versions of your pages. You should then submit the non-frames versions of your pages which can of course point to your framed Web site. Alternatively, you can enter your relevant text within the NOFRAMES area of a framed page which most search engine spiders will read.

4. Search engine spiders cannot index sites that require any kind of registration or password. A spider cannot fill out a form of any kind. The same rule applies regarding indexing of content from a searchable database, because the spider cannot fill out a form to query that database. The solution is to create static pages that the engines will be able to find.

5. Dynamic pages often block spiders. In fact, any URL containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) will be ignored by many engines.

6. Most engines cannot index text that is embedded in graphics. Text that appears in multimedia files (audio and video) cannot be indexed by most engines. Information that is generated by Java applets or in XML coding cannot be indexed by most engines.

7. If your site has a slow connection or the pages are very complex and take a long time to load, it might time out before the spider can index all the text. For the benefit of your visitors and the search engines, limit your page size to less than 60K. In fact, most Webmasters recommend that your page size plus the size of all your graphics should not exceed 50K-70K. If it does, many people on dial up connections will leave before the page fully loads.

8. If you submit just your home page, don’t expect a search engine to travel more than one or two links away from the home page or the page that you submitted. Over time they may venture deeper into your site, but don’t count on it. You’ll often need to submit pages individually that appear further down into your site or have no link from the home page.

9. If your Web site fails to respond when the search engine spider pays a visit, you will not be indexed. Even worse, if you are indexed and they pay a visit when your site is down, you’ll often be removed from their database! Therefore, it pays to have a reliable hosting service that is up 99.5% of the time. However, at some point a spider is going to hit that other 0.5% and end up yanking your pages by mistake. Therefore, it pays to keep a close eye on your listings.

10. If you have ever used any questionable techniques that might be considered an overt attempt at spamming (i.e., excessive repetition of keywords, same color text as background, or other things that the Web Position Page Critic warns you about), an engine may ignore or reject your submissions. If you’re having trouble getting indexed in the expected amount of time, make sure your site is spam-free.

11. If your site contains redirects or meta refresh tags these things can sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. Generally they will index the page that it is redirecting TO, but if it thinks you are trying to “trick” the engine by using “cloaking” or IP redirection technology, there’s a chance that it may not index the site at all.

12. If you’re submitting to a directory site like Yahoo, Open Directory, NBCI.com, LookSmart, or others, then a human being will review your site. They must decide the site is of sufficient “quality” before they will list it. I recommend you read the submission guide on the directory tab of the WebPosition Submitter. It contains tips to improve your chances of obtaining a good listing on these directories.

13. A number of engines no longer index pages residing on many common free web hosting services. The common complaint from the engines is that they get too many “junk” or low-quality submissions from free web site domains. Therefore, they often choose not to index anyone from those domains or they limit submissions from them. It’s always best to buy your own domain name (very important) and place it on a respected, paid hosting service to avoid being discriminated against.

14. Some engines have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to from the home page. HotBot has been rumored to do this. You may want to consider submitting your home page that links either directly or indirectly to your doorway pages.

15. Make sure you’re submitting within the recommended limits. Some engines do not like more than a certain number of submissions per day for the same domain. If you exceed the limit, you may find that all your submissions are ignored. Fortunately, WebPosition’s submitter will warn you regarding current limits and recommend you stay within them. Some submission consultants feel it is dangerous to submit more than ONE page a day to a engine for a given Web site. For those who wish to be ultra-conservative in their approach, the Web Position Submitter includes a checkbox to limit submissions to one URL per day per engine.

16. Last but not least, sometimes the engines just lose submissions at random through technical errors and bugs. Therefore, some people like to resubmit once or twice a month for good merit in case they do lose a submission. Certainly if you’ve followed all the “rules” and are still not listed, re-submit! Sometimes a little persistence is all that’s needed.

If any of the above scenarios apply to your submission, you should make the necessary adjustments and re-submit. If that still does not work, you should consider e-mailing or calling the search engine and asking them politely why you have not been indexed yet. Sometimes they will reply back with “Sorry, there was a problem with our system and I’ve now made sure you’ll be indexed within the next couple days.” Or, sometimes they’ll tell you why you were not indexed. In other cases, they will ignore your e-mail and you’ll have to keep e-mailing or calling them until they respond. Still, it’s definitely worth the effort to get your site listed with the major engines assuming you also take the time to optimize your pages so you’ll achieve top rankings.

Article written by Lee