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Promoting your Forum: How?

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Topic: Promoting your Forum: How?

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Subject: Promoting your Forum: How?
Date Posted: 22 August 2005 at 12:54pm

Does anyone know of a quick cheap and effective way to promote their forum or site, and get people to sign up for the newsletter?

I started a cancer foundation called CancerBEETER.org, we wanted to have a forum: a place where people can go to share their stories or opinions about the site; you know, post general cancer info.

I downloaded an all-in-one "Submit your site to all search engines" software, but that didnt seem to work at all. I cant see my site anywhere on anyof the search engines that it said it was submiting my site to...

I think I about tried about everything...i cant seem to generate any hits to the site (speaking of hits, does anyone have any code that displays active, daily and total hits to the sight; in one litlte code snippet???)

If anyone can help, please respond!

Thank you all

Keith

Replies:

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 22 August 2005 at 2:33pm

Most submit-to-all software is a waste of time and money.
Best thing is to make a little text file containing the info your need and cut and paste it into the manual submission forms for google, yahoo, msn, ask jeeves, altavista and dmoz.

Once you submit to a SE, it can take up to 4 months for them to come to your site and do a "surface crawl" - typically, the home page and 1 or 2 levels deep of links off of the home page. The engine then comes back about 3-4 months later and does a "deep crawl" which follows all the links within your site.

It seems to take about 3 months for google to surface crawl. DMOZ can take years before it gets to your site as all links are visually validated by moderators. As a result though, dmoz is used as source material for most other SE's.

You can speed up the initial crawl process by having links to your site from similar sites that get crawled frequently and/or have a high page rank for your keywords. One good method is to have a link to your site in your sig file and post a lot on forums that have similar keywords to yours.

Meta tag descriptions and keywords won't hurt, but they are pretty much ignored by most SE's. SE's want to deliver content to searchers, not meta tags. Include your keywords and key phrases in page content.

You need to use a log analyzer program like Webalizer, AWStats, or Urchin. Your host probably offers one. If not, get AWStats (freebie) and download your site logs to your PC and run it from there. It'll show what you want and much more - perticularly what keywords/phrases users entered into se's to find your site.

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 22 August 2005 at 3:06pm

here is a Question:
What do you do for immediate results, ie what if you don�t have months or years to wait for your first hit.

Does it really take that long?
are there any Backdoor approaches to promoting your site, email strategies, or something a bit quicker?

What about the sites that you hear of that have 30,000 hits/day?

What about that code snippet (hit counter that i can post on my homepage)

thanks for all your help

Going to try that AWSTATS prog.

thanks
Keith

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 22 August 2005 at 6:49pm

Yeah, it does take that long to get indexed. Somethings that help expedite the process are:

1. Get links to your site from other pages that are highly ranked - ask other cancer/cancer survivor sites to link to you. Don't just sign up for a link from a link farm site though. You'll be penalized by the SE's if sites that have no relationship to your topics link to you.

2. Put a link to a sitemap on your home page that lists all of your heavy content pages. When the SE does the shallow scan, it'll go to those links as they would be only 1 level deep.

3. Sign up with google adwords to display adds on your site. Google claims it doesn't get you indexed faster, but I don't believe them.

4. Google has a new XML site map submission that's supposed to provide a faster "temporary" index for your site. There's some argument in the SEO comunity as to wether this helps or hurts.

5. Search google with the keywords/phrases you want your site to be found by. Check out what content "first page" sites have. sites like the American Cancer society will be ranked high regardless of content. You want to look at the ones with content. Also, sites that have been around for a long time get extra points so if you see some with no content, they're probably oldtimers with a lot of inbound links from other sites.

6. Once your site is indexed, change something on your home page frequently. Stuff that changes often gets re-indexed often.

7. Never, never, use frames. SE's have a terrible time with frames.

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 22 August 2005 at 10:09pm

Hit Counter

Put this code in a file named pagecounter.asp ...

<%

Function fncPageViewCounter(ByVal strTextCounterFile)

' Increments a text file containing 1 line with the number of page views on it.
' The counter File will be in the same directory as the page which calls it.

' Depending upon how your host has implemented FSO, it may error out on first execution
' of each counter. Refreshing the page should clear each error in turn.
' e.g. If you have 3 counters on a page, you may have to refresh 3 times to get
' them all initialized

    Dim objFSO                   ' FileSystemObject
    Dim objTS              &nbs p;     ' TextStreamObject

    Dim strFileName              ' Counter File Name
    Dim strCuonterExtension    'File extension used for page counters
    Dim intOldCount
    Dim intNewCount

' Specify the Text file to store count value
' Uses the physical path - e.g. C:\home\myaccount\pageviewcounter.txt
' The file needs to be in a directory that you (IUSR_xxx) have R/W/C permissions on,

    strFileName = Server.MapPath(strTextCounterFile)

    Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

    If objFSO.FileExists(strFileName) Then
        Set objTS = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, 1)
    Else
        Set objTS = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strFileName, True)
    End If

    If Not objTS.AtEndOfStream Then
        intOldCount = objTS.ReadAll
    Else
        intOldCount = 0
    End If

    objTS.Close

    intNewCount = intOldCount + 1


' Write intNewCount value back to text file

    Set objTS = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strFileName, True)
    objTS.Write intNewCount

    objTS.Close
    Set objFSO = Nothing
    Set objTS = Nothing

    fncPageViewCounter = intNewCount

End Function

'************************************************************************************

' Determine the page the this file is currently included in
' Replace the .asp extension with .txt to generate a counter file name for the page

dim strPageID
strPageID = Replace(Request.ServerVariables("PATH_INFO"), ".asp", ".txt")

%>

You'll need to rename any .htm/.html pages you want the hit counter on to .asp and put this code in it...

<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="0">



<div align="center">
<p class="countertext">This Page View Count = <%=fncPageViewCounter(strPageID)%></p>
</div>


<div align="center">
<p class="countertext">Total Page View Count = <%=fncPageViewCounter("total_pageview_counter.txt")%></p>
</div>

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: Phat
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 4:46am

have a look at http://https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login - https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login it may help you to get a faster placement in Google.

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http://buildit.sitesell.com/sitebuildithome.html - Get a website that sells

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 9:44am

Dpyers
THanks for the code i get errors on line 14 that dont seem to clear when i refresh:

Microsoft VBScript compilation error '800a0401'

Expected end of statement

/pagecounter.asp, line 14

Dim objTS              &nbs p;     ' TextStreamObject
-----------------------^

Phat: thanks for the tip...I'll check it out!


Keith

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 9:48am

i got rid of the

Dim objTS              &nbs p;     ' TextStreamObject
-----------------------^

Now the error is on line 36



    This Page View Count =  
Microsoft VBScript runtime  error '800a0036'

Bad file mode

/pagecounter.asp, line 36

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 11:01am

got it all working!

I even got a daily counter if you want to check it out
http://www.cancerbeeter.org - http://www.cancerbeeter.org

its at the bottom right

Dpyers
is there a way to have the counter site-wide, but not have the actual counter on each page. say i enter on cancerbeeter page 2 and not on the home page, can the counter count, then display on the home.

the active users code does that...it uses a global.asa file. can i utilize the same file in your code, just count how many times it activates and not the number of sessions...would you know how to do that...

thanks

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 4:16pm

Phat:
Thanks for the sitemap info...is the sitemap supposed to look like this:
http://www.cancerbeeter.org/sitemap.xml - http://www.cancerbeeter.org/sitemap.xml

or is it supposed to be functional for users to click on?

thanks
keith

Posted By: Phat
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 9:25pm

The xml is right.

I ahve started playing with http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ - http://johannesmueller.com/gs/ which build the xml for you.

You can also try adding a Sitemap for users.

-------------
http://buildit.sitesell.com/sitebuildithome.html - Get a website that sells

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 9:39pm

rcpilotp51 wrote:

Dpyers
THanks for the code i get errors on line 14 that dont seem to clear when i refresh:

Microsoft VBScript compilation error '800a0401'

Expected end of statement

/pagecounter.asp, line 14

Dim objTS              &nbs p;     ' TextStreamObject
-----------------------^

Phat: thanks for the tip...I'll check it out!


Keith

Get rid of the &nbs p; It's a cut-n-paste artifact from the RTE in wwf. It shouldn't be there. Leave the rest of the line.

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 23 August 2005 at 9:54pm

rcpilotp51 wrote:

Phat:
Thanks for the sitemap info...is the sitemap supposed to look like this:
http://www.cancerbeeter.org/sitemap.xml - http://www.cancerbeeter.org/sitemap.xml

or is it supposed to be functional for users to click on?

thanks
keith

It's just an xml data file for google. If you wanted it to be functional for users, you'd have to run it through and XSLT transformation file to convert it to html or stick it in an html page with an xml doctype and use css to define display rules for the tags. The XSLT route would enable you to create hyperlinks out of the loc tags though.

I noted that a couple of items in your file were missing timestamps. Don't know if it matters though. However, I'd add priority tags for the home page, major content pages and the forum active topics page.

Also, put a link from the home page to the active topics page. Until you're deep crawled, set the active topics default to the max amount of time allowed. This will put all topics in your forum only 2 levels down from the home page which should get them the crawled faster.

-------------

Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.

Posted By: rcpilotp51
Date Posted: 24 August 2005 at 8:05am

What doe s the priority tag look like...

ill try that PHat: thanks

Active topics... got it

Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 25 August 2005 at 6:25am

<priority>0.5</priority>

Values are 0.0 to 1.0 - default if no tag is 0.5
It's the priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site.

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Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me.