What can I do to raise awareness about my website?

[45th Med]

I think I've had a good day, 1000 hits in one day (since going online yesterday) but I'd love for that to be 10 times the amount of hits per day.

What kind of things can I do to promote my website? What other websites are out there where I can post and participate in discussion about politics, breaking news, ect?

What other websites would be good to exchange links with, ect?

[NightTrain]

1. Posting the URL here would be a good start

You also might want to go into Usenet and do a search on "politics." When you find the appropriate newsgroups, post the URL to them.

[bif]

2. Are you kidding me?

1000 hits a day on your first day is outstanding! If that's how many you got, it'll just keep growing. Just be sure to keep the content fresh. Not changing your site's content is a sure way to lose viewers.

[45th Med]

3. Thanks Bif, 6 months ago.....

When I started an HTML version of the same thing and I got 28,678 hits a month. :D I was pretty happy, then someone hacked my website so I took it down for 3 months to review my options. I hope the PHP version will be more secure and fun for viewers.

Thanks for your reply.

[PacificWind]

4. Search Engines -- Open Directory -- Other Weblogs

There is a debate whether description/keywords meta tags make a difference, but I can't see a problem adding them in since some search engines still us them.

<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">

There is also some debate whether the -link- element aides search engines -- a lot of people use them to show the relation between a set of documents. I'm told that they also have use for web accessibility issues.

<link rel="start" href="http://www.indiemediamagazine.com">
<link rel="section" href="/page01/" title="page 1 yadda">
<link rel="section" href="/page02/" title="page 2 yadda">
<link rel="subsection" ... >
<link rel="help" href="/about/" title="About Us">
etc...

You might want to try and get your site placed in a Directory.

Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org

The Yahoo! Directory
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest

Another way would be to mutually link with other weblogs.

What you really want are -Unique Visitors- to your website. Identified by their unique IP address. Though this in of itself has some flaws (DHCP) but it is definitely more representative than using -hits- as an indicator.

-Hits- include all files requested. For example if you had a page with 20 images on it and I clicked on it the would be 20 hits added to the total count. Add to that css/html/script/text/etc files, the total hits jumps even higher for that one page.

Another thing you could to make you site more accessible to search engines is to move your -welcome- to a different location. It is buried deep on the page.

<b>Welcome to Independent Media Magazine!</b><br>Independent Media Magazine is a DVD Video Magazine dedicated to Independent Media. Every 2 months we offer a new DVD issue full of short films, animations, music videos, computer game trailers and other compelling visual media.

If that is a hassle you might add this below the body tag and leave the other -welcome- where it is.

<div style="display:none">Welcome to Independent Media Magazine! Independent Media Magazine is a DVD Video Magazine dedicated to Independent Media. Every 2 months we offer a new DVD issue full of short films, animations, music videos, computer game trailers and other compelling visual media.</div>

Nice site by the way.

[brainshrub]

5. How the hell do you get 1000 a day in your first few months?

I'd love to know.

ON EDIT: I'm getting about 20 - 30 unique hits a day. I noticed that my numbers have gone up in the last two weeks to average 40-45 a day.

1000 a day is incredible. How did you do it?