Hi, We launched this website on October 6th. www.scorechase.com It is for GMAT Preparation and has online tutorials, discussions and GMAT guidance. I was wondering if someone could help me with the following: - How to market this website, what is the best way. So far our only source of traffic is orkut (and a few other websites). - Google is not indexing the website, I have tried sitemaps, but it doesnt index the website at all - what are my options? - Will google adwords help in marketing. The website is like a private project for me and hasnt yet reached a break-even. So I am not looking to invest a lot regards,
Google takes some time to index pages. Get some quality backlinks from high PR sites. Have you checked the logs to see if googlebot's visited your site? If the bot's visited your site, you'll be indexed shortly. If not - be patient. According to yahoo, the only backlinks you have are from a vbulletin support forum. Try submitting the site to lots of directories, google likes backlinks. Also noticed this site is not very SE friendly. The dynamic links containing operators don't help at all. Instead of using "name.php?article=21&view=2" etc.. Use scorechase.com/name.php/articles/CATEGORY/NAME_OF_ARTICLE/ - that's a more friendly link. Try to include some of the keywords you're looking to target in <H1> and <H2> tags. <H1>Score Chase</H1> for example, if that's a keyword you'd like to target. When you submit to directories, make the link title the keyword(s) you're optimizing for. The site needs a lot of work, but looks very established. By implementing what's mentioned here, you'll be in the top10 in no time. Lastly, I didn't notice if you were selling anything or not, but unless you're actually selling a product/service, a PPC campaign wouldn't do you any good if you're just looking for traffic. Good luck, and let us know how everything turns out!
Thanks J0ned for the tips, I will try to put them in action as much as possible. I do provide some paid subscriptions where I provide special GMAT questions and other reading materials. As per the Google webmaster tools, Google has successfully visited the site twice : Once on October 16th and then on December 4th. Thanks very much for help. Any more ideas are welcome. I use vBulletin Software. I am not sure if I can change the type of links that it provides . Is there a way?
Webmaster tools is pretty good about telling you what's going on or why your site wasn't indexed. Check out the google webmaster guidelines to make sure you're not violating any of their rules or whatever... I also think the backlinks will do some good. I'm not familiar with pre-made scripts like vBulletin because I don't use them (Security vulnerabilities). I'd recommend learning a server side language like coldfusion (i love it) or php, even .net (bleh). This will give you ultimate power and control over your site. Search some of the other forums for "vbulletin" to see if anyone else was able to come up with a solution. Digitalpoint gets indexed with it's funky URL's, so maybe that has nothing to do with it. I know google only index the root and /index.cfm of my page (jruck) because the rest use dynamic URLs, yet MSN and Yahoo have indexed my entire site. Google's picky - don't give up though.
Myspace is a social networking site that I've little to no success with. I've created profiles with hundreds of friends, even purchased bulletins with no results. Wouldn't waste my time with myspace. No other ideas at this point.. Work on keyword density. If there's a specific term you'd like to rank for, make sure 6-15% of the words on your site are your keyword. Also make backlink titles with those keywords. You could also sign up with relevant forums that are busy, include your URL in your signature and any relevant replies.
you could do some PPC campaigns, but at the end, it's often wasted money and it's hard to get revenue out, if you are not even break-even yet, but good luck!