In Search of Traffic

One of the most frustrating things about being a webmaster is trying to direct traffic to your Web site. There are more Web sites offering to drive traffic to your site than there are AOL disks in the world. But what do these sites really give you?

Some of them are legitimate, and they actually get a link to your site onto a high-traffic site. But all of these services cost money. If you're a non-commercial webmaster, you're persona incognito. They won't admit you exist.

The others fall into neat little categories of uselessness. There are MLM schemes: "You put up a page with these five links, someone puts up a page with four of yours and their own, etc." which don't work because you then have to drive traffic to the MLM site. There are banner exchanges, but who wants to use up their visitors' bandwidth advertising other sites? There are click for hits programs, but what webmaster has time to surf other people's sites? I should be working on my site instead. There are search engines, but they take a long time to index your site, and the chances are worse than two-to-one that your site will appear in search results below the porn site that put every word in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary into their keywords meta tag. There are indexes, but indexes don't bring a lot of traffic, although what visitors they do bring are visitors who want to see your site, which is better than 10 who don't care about your site.

The problem is a difficult one to solve.

Maybe this will help: Research Assistant