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rcpilotp51 
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 Topic: Promoting your Forum: How?
Posted: 22 August 2005 at 12:54pm |
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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
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dpyers
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Posted: 22 August 2005 at 2:33pm |
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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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rcpilotp51
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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
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dpyers
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Posted: 22 August 2005 at 6:49pm |
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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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dpyers
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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...
<!--Inset this line as the first line of your page-->
<!--You'll need to adjust the path to wherever you put pagecounter.asp-->
<!--leave the comment characters before and after the include statement-->
<!--#include virtual="/includes/pagecounter.asp"-->
<!--You'll want to prevent the page from being reloaded from the browser cache-->
<!--and force it to return to the server to increment the counter.-->
<!--To do that, add these meta tages in your <HEAD> section-->
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="EXPIRES" CONTENT="0">
<!--This example will automatically generate the counter file name by-->
<!--replacing the .asp extension of the page file name with .txt-->
<div align="center">
<p class="countertext">This Page View Count = <%=fncPageViewCounter(strPageID)%></p>
</div>
<!-- This example shows how you can specify a particular counter file to be incremented-->
<div align="center">
<p class="countertext">Total Page View Count =
<%=fncPageViewCounter("total_pageview_counter.txt")%></p>
</div> |
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Phat
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Posted: 23 August 2005 at 4:46am |
have a look at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login it may help you to get a faster placement in Google.
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rcpilotp51
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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
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rcpilotp51
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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
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