JimWorld Gazette Issue #25 10/17/1997

Gazette - Issue #25 - October 17, 1997

-- Is The You?
-- Site Traffic Reporting - Part III
-- Snippets
-- Feedback From Last Week
-- Visibility For Everyone
-- Need Some Hits?
-- Wherefore Art Thou Infoseek?
-- This Week's Question

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g25

It's not bad enough that I have to get older every year and must endure the torment of the dreaded BIRTHDAY. Now comes the first Half-A-Birthday of the Gazette. Twenty-six weeks and twenty-five issues. 'Happy half-a-birthday to you. Happy half-a-birthday dear Ga-ze-tte. Happy half-a-birthday to you.' It's really hard to get that many syllabi into that song.

Just for your information (FYI): The September traffic reports that I have just been going through revealed that VirtualPROMOTE had identifiable traffic from 96 countries during September. That's the highest yet. I guess we really do have a worldwide community at VirtualPROMOTE. That pleases us all very much.

Another bit of basic research (read: piddling around having fun) reveals that the combined file size of all issues of the Gazette consume 648KB on disk. If all 5,000 of you have all of the issues archived, the world consumption of disk by the Gazette is 3,225,000,000 bytes.

You may remember when JimWorld was selected a Hot Site, and then a Choice Site by Starting Point. Well, they found more stuff at the site that they liked. They featured the Meta Tags tutorial on 10/8/97. I was wondering why that page doubled in traffic for a few days. If you haven't submitted your site to Starting Point, do so today at http://www.stpt.com. It is the best directory of carefully selected sites to be found anywhere on the web and has built an amazing reputation for the directory.

A flood of subscriptions (well, at least a steady stream) is coming in from Brazil since Gustavo put the subscription banner and some information about the Gazette on his site at http://www.gustavo.net/novo.html. If you are looking for ways to expand into foreign markets, the best tip I have for you is to find a friend in the country you want to enter. If he or she already has traffic in the country, that is the person that can best help you get traffic. Make sure you return the favor.

IS THIS YOU?

When I first started building the first SmartDesk web site (a truly world class way-below average site), I spent a lot of time surfing the web. I went everywhere. Not just software sites, but every kind of site. I never knew where I might find the next great idea to steal. I would wind up at a cool looking site and something would catch my fancy and zoom, off I'd go on an Odyssey of the mind. Nothing to do with researching for a software web site. Just cruisin' the web. Having fun. And gathering data, impressions and ideas at a furious rate. When you are having fun, you learn faster and better. That's why I used to take magic tricks and other weird things to class when I was teaching. Make it fun and it sticks.

That's all very interesting, but - so what? Good question. Thank you for asking. The so what is this: How much time do you spend just surfing for fun now that your life is consumed by your web site? As much as you did before starting the site? Hardly. No one has the time. But have you totally lost track of having some fun on the web? Probably. I know that happens to me and I have to force myself to go cruising even when I don't have time. And the amazing thing is that when I'm on the web just for fun, I find some pretty amazing things that go right into the Gazette. I never would have found these ideas just visiting the news sources and other resource sites like the Search Engine Watch site (fantastic site, BTW) http://searchenginewatch.com/

So, your assignment for this weekend is to spend 3 hours surfing sites that you are interested in. They are not to have anything to do with your site. You can't even take notes. Just go have fun. Visit a few Hot Site directories (like VirtualPROMOTE's) and visit some really cool places. Or do a little research on your hobby. Or teach your kid to surf. Or your spouse/mate.

Running through the whole web community is the fact that the majority of webmasters who keep hammering at their site trying to make it always better are a very bright group of folks. Very bright. Very motivated. Like a dog with a bone. They just won't let go of it. Does compulsive fit in this paragraph? These are the traits that successful people share, but the Internet is a bit different. It is a totally solo trip. You work alone at weird hours of the day. You get excited about things that don't make for great pick up lines at the local pub. Once in a while, take time for you. Surf for fun. Turn off the computer and build a model rocket. Go to a movie. The Internet will be there when you get back.

If you're running a site that doesn't have to generate your livelihood, and it starts to be a chore to work on it, turn your computer off for a whole week. Get far away from it. If a week isn't long enough, take two weeks. The web experience is supposed to be fun. That's why we do all of this insane work in the middle of the night. It's fun. We get something out of it. Publishing a site fulfills a need in each of us or we wouldn't be doing it. It's certainly not for the money, is it? So when you have to force yourself to do the work, just don't do it. Wait a while until it is fun again. Put this message on your home page:

GONE FISHING!

SITE TRAFFIC REPORTING - PART III

This week, let's start the talk about the types of reports you can get from your server's activity log files. We won't take up how to use them until next week, but knowing what is available is some necessary information before understanding usage.

I have posted a sample of a daily log report from last year for you to look at as we discuss log reporting. The first is the daily summary report at http://www.jimworld.com/logreport/summary.html and it gives an overview of all the traffic that happened on the site for one day. The other is the daily traffic detail report sorted by visitor at http://www.jimworld.com/logreport/details.html. Browse through these now and come back to the Gazette for a discussion of the log reports.

The first, and possibly most valuable report, that you can get out of your server logs is the Visitor Count report. This report tells you how many visitors your site received and what they did while they were there. Due to many factors this is not an exact number. The report program can make some educated guesses when it runs into the same IP address that is being used by different people. For instance, AOL has a limited number of IP addresses and assigns them to the people that are active at any given time. That means that several people could visit your site using the same address. Unless you have a really big and busy site, this doesn't harm your numbers much. The odds that two people would come to your site from AOL one right after the other is pretty slim considering how many addresses AOL has. This is not unique to AOL, I just use them as an example. All access providers assign dynamic addresses to all of their dial-up customers.

Take a look at the Summary report. The first paragraph tells you how many visitors the program calculated as having visited your site that day. That number is derived from an analysis of the detail report.

Look at the detail report now. You'll see that the program has arranged the information to show each unique visit that came into your site. It bases this on the IP address of the visitor, and the time of day that the visit occurred. If one IP address shows up with a gap of more than one hour, it is counted as 2 different visits. Or if the referrer information is different for the same IP address, that constitutes a different visitor.

Take a close look at the detail report. It shows you exactly where everyone came into your site, and every page they visited, in order, while they were there. That is valuable information.

If you notice that a large percentage of people leave your site as soon as they get to one certain page, than you have a problem on that page. Could be that something is wrong with the content and is driving people away. Or maybe the page is broken. No matter what the reason, it is something you need to look into.

Most moderately priced site statistics programs avoid trying to calculate the number of visitors to a site. It is the most complex of the reports that can be generated and requires constant education to make the customers understand why it is not exact in its numbers. I have used AccessWatch for 2 years and have found the visitor counts to be accurate to within 2-3%, which is good enough for me.

There are other methods that number purists suggest is the only way to track visitors to a site. The first idea they run out is the cookie. They claim that cookies are the only reliable way to count every visitor. That's not correct. A growing number of paranoids are panic stricken over the though of getting a cookie, even though they aren't exactly sure what a cookie is, so they turn cookies off in their browser. How are you going to count them?

They other highly touted technique is to require each person to log in before they can enter your site. That works. And it has the added advantage of reducing your traffic so far that your ISP will praise you. Just watch how many visitors flip you the bird and leave when asked to log in to a site they aren't even sure they want to visit anyway.

Next week we'll talk about the rest of the information on the detail and summary reports, and then we'll move on to other software packages that have some different reports. From there, we'll look at the main programs available for site traffic analysis and finally, how to use this flood of information to improve and manage your site.

SNIPPETS

Are you keeping up with the latest trends in Internet advertising. Can you pronounce 'interstitial'? No? Then you should read the article from WebWeek about new techniques to replace the venerable old banner ad. Good article. Scary thought. http://www.webweek.com/current/undercon/19971013-banner.html

The push channel world is starting to show signs of organization. While that takes some of the fun out of it, you can now read tutorials right from the horse's mouth about setting up a channel. - From Netscape: http://developer.netscape.com/one/netcaster/index.html - From Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/prog/ie4/channels/tutorial-f.htm

Looking for an award? Try Investigative Journalism Resource: Picks of the Week at http://www.controversy.net/opb.html. While you're there, browse around for a while. The entire site manages to stay very focused on the message they set out to deliver. That is harder than it sounds. Staying on topic is of course one of my stronger points.

"This e-mail is intended to serve as an announcement to any skeptics lurking out there about Virtual Promote. I re-did my meta tags as suggested. I have moved to the #4 position in Alta Vista and Yahoo. I still am not in the top 100 in the other top search engines, however being #4 in Yahoo is probably worth all the other search engines rolled into one. Thanks for the valued info...." MJ Rotter Redding Cyber Mall http://www.c-zone.net/mav1054/Classified/CyberMall.htm

If you don't mind having a banner ad on every page of your site, for which you don't get any money, you might be interested in HyperMart at http://www.hypermart.net. HyperMart offers businesses free server space. You can have your own domain name. No limit on traffic. CGI-bin. Lots of features. All for Free to the site owner. They get the right to put a banner ad on every page of your site. That's how you pay for the server space. I don't have any idea how well this will work out. They just got started this week, so only time will tell.

Time to head down under for a well designed site with tons of good information about web building and web promotion. You can also subscribe to a good newsletter but only if you'll still have time to read the Gazette every week. Expose Your Business To 50 Million People at http://www.learningcurve.com.au

The Web Robots Page at http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html has FAQs on spiders and bots and a long list of the bots and spiders crawling the web. Once you start spending time in your server log files you will start to wonder who these critters are that keep asking for the robots.txt file and why are they coming to your site. The Web Robots Page will help you spot which search engines are crawling around your site and how often they are doing it.

Want to see an amazing effort towards community building that will establish a site as one of the real players in its niche? Head over to Doubletake Gallery and cruise their Emerging Artists area. I just got this from Bob, the owner of the gallery:

The Emerging Artists Page at Doubletake Gallery is finally up and running! Artists have direct, 24 hour control over there own "virtual corner" of our gallery. There's too much neat stuff wrapped up in this new page to start listing them all, so if you want details, click on the following link. In addition to information about the page, it has direct links to the Emerging Artists Page and to a demo of the Artists Admin Page, which is every bit as cool as what the public sees. http://www.DoubletakeArt.com/ea-infopage.html

Can you think of a way to capture and empower your web community? It's worth the effort.

Simply Secure at http://www.simplysecure.com/ has an excellent tutorial and demonstration about using secure servers to accept your orders and other sensitive data at your web site. This should be required reading for all e-commerce Gazeteers.

Have you done your week's public relations? You know, all that free space in newsletters and magazines that you can get if you just send out a good press release. Drop in at Xpress Press http://www.xpresspress.com/ for some good information about How-To. Doing good PR is a learnable skill, but if you want a little professional help, just tell them Jim sent you. It won't save you a dime, but it makes me look good, and after all, that's what's really important isn't it?

FEEDBACK FROM LAST WEEK

"There's a new site just coming on-line to help webmasters find advertisers for their sites. It's called Advert Net at http://www.itdirect.com/advert/ and it's free for both web site operators and advertisers. There is the beginning of a webmaster member area that will point to resources around the net. Since they are just getting going, don't expect a lot from the webmaster area yet, but the reason to go there is to find advertisers! And that service is in place, so go list your site."

Hi Webmasters,

Last week you probably saw the above section of the Gazette. Those of you which have listed your site will have probably visited the members forum. As Jim said last week there isn't much there. I have now, in an attempt to fix this, placed a form at: http://www.itdirect.com/advert/vplink.html

At the moment this form is only accessible to VirtualPROMOTE Gazette readers. You can suggest your site to appear in the forum. Your site must be offering a service to webmasters whether you offer images or CGI scripts or such. I would be pleased to hear from you.

David Varnham Advert Net http://www.itdirect.com/advert/

-- Jim -- I see a lot of new Advert Net registrations from names I'm familiar with in the Gazette family. Way to go. But there's a few that I know should be listed that haven't gotten around to it yet. What's the matter? Already got too much money? Let me know. I can help you with that problem. --

AN OPPORTUNITY OF VISIBILITY FOR EVERYONE

Jim,

First, let me thank you. As a subscriber to your newsletter since the beginning, I've been helped tremendously by the information and resources you provide.

I maintain the AnimationStore.com, the website of the Great Movie And Animation Store.

To build traffic, we are going to begin providing an area for our visitors to have fun and relax. The new section will contain games, trivia contests, sweepstakes, opinion polls, and gossip about film, television, and animation. I figure a good source of information is site owners that already create the content for their own sites. I also figure that my fellow Gazette subscribers are a good place to find these site owners.

We are offering a chance to get free advertising in the form of a free banner ad on this soon to be launched section of our site.

To get the free banner ad, Gazette readers only have to write a few short (100 words or so) articles of news and gossip each week for the new section. This way, as our traffic builds, so does that of our Content Partners.

This idea was inspired by numerous articles and tidbits from the VirtualPromote Gazette newsletter. As I sit reading it each week I try and think of ways to stretch the ideas and resources you provide so that I can better promote my site. This is my most recent brainchild, and since it is something I as a webmaster would jump at, I hope that it has the same appeal to others.

Site owners interested in becoming AnimationStore.com Content Partners can get more information by visiting http://AnimationStore.com/contentpartners or by emailing Adam Kalsey at mailto:webmaster@animationstore.com.

Thanks for your time (now and in the writing of the Gazette).

-------------
Adam Kalsey
The Great Movie & Animation Store Web Master
http://www.AnimationStore.com
Movie, television, and animation information, games, and memorabilia.

----Jim here - This is exactly the type of action I always hope for as I keep working on the Gazette. Adam took the Gazette as input to his creative machine (brain) and massaged it around until an original idea emerges that wasn't in the Gazette. Original thought. What a concept. That is why I keep telling you about ideas that other people have come up with. Not so you can copy them and do a 'me too', but just to give you more Input (as Johnny 5 would say). This particular idea is more than just fuel for your thinking machine. It's also a valuable opportunity to get yourself some exposure by joining a community being built at the Animation Store. Just remember that VirtualPROMOTE is still your home town. ----

NEED SOME HITS?

The following are some good places to submit your site. Please remember that submitting your site to a directory or award site that has specific types of sites that are willing to consider is a waste of everybody's time if your site isn't the type they want. Maintaining a directory or administering an award program is incredibly time consuming when everyone obeys the rules. To take up people's time with frivolous submissions hurts everyone on the web. Sites close up for lack of time. Award reviewers throw in the towel and go back to making a living.

If you submit to a directory about tree frogs, and your site isn't about tree frogs, but rather about crickets, at least do the administrator the kindness of putting something like this in your submission: 'I know your site only looks for information about tree frogs and my site is about crickets. I am submitting because your users might be interested to read about crickets which are a primary food source for tree frogs.' This lets the administrator decide immediately if your site is close enough to be worth looking at.

Anyway, back to submission sites.

NewPage List http://web-star.com/newpage/newpage.html They only choose one new site each day to include in an e-mail message to their subscribers. If you're chosen, you get lots of traffic for the day.

The Above & Beyond Cool Site of the Day http://www.abmall.com/cv/csod.html has been 'off the air' while the webmaster moved the family home, but now it's back and taking submissions.

Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research Cool Medical and Science Sites http://www.worldweb.com/ahfmr/html-index/CoolSites.html Don't submit unless you qualify.

eduNEWS http://edunews.com is a new, free online service that will be providing current news, information, and links about how the Internet is being used to benefit education. The scheduled launch date for the first eduNEWS Bulletin is October, 1997. Do you have educational news about projects, initiatives, people, seminars, or Internet sites you would like to post?

The Canlinks Directory http://www.canlinks.net/ is a comprehensive listing of world wide web sites with an emphasis on Canadian Sites. In the near future, you will be able to modify your own listing, view the top 50 sites or view Today's Added Sites.

Over 250,000 businesses from more than 170 countries are registered in Pronet ... are you? http://www.pronett.com/

The InfoHighway http://www.infohiway.com/ is a very busy search engine that can deliver a lot of traffic to you. Get listed.

WHOW http://www.whow.com/ is kind of an interesting implementation of the web ring idea. It basically is a long list of rings that are administered by the WHOW site. You cruise with a frames setup that doesn't require the sites in the ring to do anything. You go from site to site in the ring either automatically every 60 seconds or by clicking on the WHOW navigation bar. I really think you should visit and get listed, but don't take too many tours while you are there unless you get your kicks from restarting your browser.

The Zenith Medianet http://www.zenithmedia.com/ is about as well done of a link directory as you are going to find. It's fast and well organized. You should go get listed. It would benefit from another layer of information about each site (maybe a one line description of what the site contains), but I find it very useful.

WHEREFORE ART THOU INFOSEEK?

Last week we discussed the new ground rules at Infoseek. Remember that? Well, forget all that. There is new, dubious information directly from the powers that be at Infoseek, as relayed to me by Danny at Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com. If you aren't a member there yet, you are missing a valuable flow of reliable information from a very creative mind.

The official word that Danny got from Infoseek is that they never did implement a three repetition limit on keywords. That was just an error in communications by one of their employees. Infoseek reports that 'Infoseek has not had a "seven word limit" regarding meta tags since Sept. 1996. From that date on, Infoseek has simply said not to overdue it, with no specific recommendations."

Of course, this statement of fact conflicts with the reality of much testing done by myself and several other engine-watchers. The reality is that Infoseek was dropping sites and down-grading sites that went beyond the 3 repeat limit. Now my testing shows that they have in fact moved up to a higher number. I can't nail down the limit yet, but you are safe at the seven repeat number.

Infoseek is not doing this to be mean and ornery. They have the fastest Add URL of the major search sites and that feature is causing problems. It is not unusual for a webmaster to submit his site every day after making changes, to try to raise his/her ranking. Spamming runs amuck. So Infoseek has to try to constantly find better was to keep the playing field level for everyone.

So why don't they tell us what their exact rules are? Same reason you don't tell the enemy how far off his artillery rounds are.

One thing of note at Infoseek is the grouping of all pages from a site into one appearance in the search results. That is making it much more friendly to wade through the thousands of sites indexed for any given search phrase. No more submitting hundreds of pages to capture a search phrase. They all get indexed, but they don't show unless the searchers ask for them.

From a subscriber comes this little ditty:

Dear Mr. Wilson:

A while back you did a mention about problems submitting to search engines. I have since encountered problems with InfoSeek. Below is the message that I received when trying to register my homepage http://members.aol.com/jobfindr/

------snipped directly from Netscape's browser--------

Error: Access Denied to Infoseek

Infoseek could not index http://members.aol.com/jobfindr.

At this time Infoseek is not indexing web pages from certain domains through the Instant Add-URL feature. Most free, public web domains are affected by this restriction. We have taken this action because of continued attempts to subvert our index. We recognize that such practices have not been used by everyone. However, the frequency of abuse requires us to impose it. We apologize for the inconvenience to those inadvertently affected by this policy.

Our intent is to insure the highest quality of search results for our users. Web pages that comply with our Guidelines may still be submitted through electronic mail. Please send your list of URLs, each beginning with

http://

to www-request@infoseek.com>

Thank you.

-----end snip----

The first time I encountered this I tried to write to InfoSeek requesting clarification as to what was going on. My mail got bounced back. Finally after a few days I managed to get an email through. I was told that AOL was one of the domains that was being blocked, but that I could submit my request via email.

I then proceeded to send a listing of all the URLs on my site. I was told that it would take 2-3 weeks as it was a *manual process.* It is now 5 days short of a month and the URLs are *still not active* on the InfoSeek search engine. I tried to write to them over the weekend and my mail was *bounced back.*

-- Jim -- I'll keep on beating the same old rhythm on the same old drum -- If you are building a site for anyone other than your Mom and close friends, get your own domain name and sign up with a commercial ISP. Like it or not, if your site is on a free server, lots of people will not take you seriously. Infoseek; in fact all of the search engines and directories, are under constant attack from the amateur 'professional' web site promoters. You know who they are. 'I'll submit your site to 1,000 top search engines. I'll submit every page of your site. I'll do it for $29.95. I'll ruin your life.' Or maybe you bought one of the reports that reveal 'The secrets of spamming yourself into non-existence through search engines and e-mail. Remember, in America it's a Constitutional right to make yourself look like an idiot.'

THIS WEEK'S QUESTION

We haven't had a weekly question for a while so when I saw this one, I thought of you. You probably have some good ideas for our webmaster Burt. Send your suggestions to Burt at mailto:habreu@bellsouth.net and he will summarize them for us and we'll publish the summary in a future Gazette. That's the price he pays to gain access to 5,000 of the best webmasters on the Internet today.

Burt's question is:

"I have a site, Visual Basic Explorer at http://www.vbexplorer.com that provides content oriented to the novice Visual Basic programmer and was wondering if you had suggestions as to some places I might promote this type of educational content driven site. I've availed myself of all the common free services I could think of but realize there might be other resources to publicize this site, to either places that may attract a lot of students, or parents/teachers seeking educational material. I imagine there may even be awards (or should be!) or sites that have educational related or content driven sites as a main emphasis. Anyhow, your thoughts on this are appreciated. Keep up the good work. Burt."

Let me start the ball rolling with my suggestions (as if there were any way to stop me!)

Burt, there are several things you can do with a site such as yours. They are nothing 'magic' or 'secret' in spite of the offers you get in your email box offering to sell you the 'secrets to driving your server to its knees for only $49.95.' The suggestions I am going to make work for any type of site and though we have talked about them before, they bear repeating many times over. I'm going to assume that you have already done the search engine preparation of your site and submitted it everywhere you can find.

Know your competition. Visit the search engines and do searches on all of your primary keywords. Bookmark all of the sites that appear to be targeting the same demographic group that you are after. First, visit their sites and see if they have any keywords that you might have missed. Now do a reverse look up for each of those competitor's sites. You now have a big list of webmasters that have linked to a site similar to yours. Of course, yours being better than those others, the same webmasters would probably be happy to link to your site. (see past Gazette for discussion on how to ask for that link.)
Change the name of any 'link' pages you have. Position all of your link resources as The Visual Basic Directory. Do it up right. No wimpy link pages. A searchable directory of quality VB resources on the web to assist the beginning VB programmer. VBD is the VB community designed to be outgrown! Of course we know that they will never outgrow VBD. VBD will keep growing to offer value to every experience level. Either a place to learn, or a place to teach.

Create a button like the one that PartyFinder.net http://www.partyfinder.net/ has created and you can see on their home page. Every site that you list in your VB Directory (with a review of each one, of course.) should get an email from you stating that their site has been reviewed and found to be of such high quality and content rich that it has been selected as a VB Directory Select Site. Notice that this is NOT an award. This is like the sticker on the door that says 'This business is a member of the Chamber of Commerce.' Expand your directory to include a significant number of links and reviews.

When I first suggested this to the nice people at Healthlinks, I told them it would deliver a significant and instant flow of traffic. I'm sure glad it worked. I didn't tell them that they were the guinea pig. But from the first day it delivered and continues to deliver about 3 times the traffic they are getting from the search engines. And as it gains recognition value, it will help the sites displaying the button by putting a desirable stamp of approval on the other sites. Everybody wins, including the public. Healthlinks set out with the goal of building a community, not to build a web site. They have hit the target dead-center. Maybe that is a poor choice of words for a medical site. If you are in the healthcare field and haven't joined the Healthlinks community, you are missing out on a real happening.
Submit for every award you can find.
Open a threaded forum where people can ask questions and get answers from other visitors and from you. At first you won't have many people asking questions, so ask them yourself (under many different names) and then answer them. This makes your site look popular and busy. People spend an amazing amount of time reading forum postings. I don't understand why, but it really works. The next step after the forum is to add chat rooms with Guides in each chat room to offer assistance.
Of course, immediately start a newsletter and go into publication at once. As soon as you have 1 subscriber, you are ready. Invite some knowledgable people with VB expertise to contribute on a regular basis. Of course, they will want to promote that on their site.
Begin testing products that are in the general area of interest. Create a product review area. Let the visitors contribute their thoughts or votes. Get them involved.
Participate in several newsgroups. Offer good advice and become known as a helpful expert. If there are no good discussion groups for entry level VB programmers, start one. A moderated one. And have a panel of experienced programmers on the list as 'Guides' to offer help. Help your Guides to develop a broad reputation as their reward for helping out.
Create a signature file to be used on ALL of your email. It should have your Name, email address, URL, and the purpose of your site.
Hold a contest. State a problem and publish the 10 best solutions to that problem each week.
Offer to write articles for other newsletters and require that they include a short paragraph about your site as payment for the article. Do not try to run the same article everywhere. Write it and offer it to the biggest list you can find. At the Gazette I don't want to run articles that have appeared all over the web. I want fresh content written specifically for the Gazette community.

That last word, community, is the goal of all of the above suggestions. Build a community. Get your visitors involved. Give them a reason to come back often. Make them feel at home and they will start bringing their friends along when they come-a-callin'.

Obviously, you can't do all of this at once. But you have to start somewhere. Stop worrying about the search engines. They will never deliver the level of traffic you want. You have to go out and create your traffic by building a community for them to belong to.

OK Gazette community. You take it from here.