Banners

Designing a banner is simple. Designing an effective banner with a high click-through-rate (CTR) is slightly more complex. Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Keep the file size low. The faster it downloads, the longer your viewer sees it, and the happier both the user and the webmaster are. To do this, use less colors, larger rather then smaller elements to the picture, animation with only minor changes, optimization software, and remove unnecessary frames if it's animated.
• Studies have shown that some animation and the words "click here", among other things, bring better clickthrough rates.
• Don't try to fit in too much text. It should be no more then people can read in passing.
• Like with any advertising, humor and wit are a plus.
• Choose a color scheme that will look attractive against any background.

Directories

Directories serve much the same purpose as search engines, but unlike search engines all of the sites are indexed by humans that review them, often volunteers. Because of this, directories may have slightly higher standards, and may take longer before your site is indexed. Here are a few of the larger ones you should submit your site to when you feel it's ready:

Yahoo!
Looksmart
Go
Open Directory Project

Making Money With Your Web Site

Once your site begins to get traffic, you should start making money from it through banner advertising. The best way to make money through your web site is through Commission Junction. They provide affiliate marketing services for hundreds of companies, allowing them to pay you for leads, sales, clicks, or impressions from your site. You search their database of companies, find the ones that best suit your site and tastes, and paste the code for their button or banner into your pages. When people click through from your site and buy something you are automatically paid for referring them.

Click Here for Commission Junction

Search Engine Tools And Tips

It takes more then just submitting your pages to search engines to get the traffic you want. Any pages you submit should be optimized for the search words you hope to be found with, which is not as easy as it sounds. Your competitors are optimizing their pages as well, and each search engine uses slightly different criteria. What will help with one, will hurt with another. Here are a few general tips.

• Use each of your major search terms at least a few times per page, but not so much that it looks artificial to readers or like spam to search engines.
• More then a couple hundred words will hurt you, not help you. The frequency of your search terms in relation to the other words is one thing the search engines look for. 5 occurrences of "gecko" amidst 5,000 words will not impress them much.
• Don't try to trick search engines. Examples: Using text the same color as the background for better placement, repeating a word over and over, using words with font too small to be seen. Most search engines are wise to these ruses, and will just ignore your site all-together.
• Use meta tags to help define what search terms you want to use.
• Include your search terms in your title and description tags, and keep them brief. It may also help to name directories or files the same as your search terms.
• Re-submit your pages to search engines periodically (or let 4Traffic re-submit for you.) Different search engines have indexed different numbers of pages. Most search engines have indexed perhaps 1/10 of all pages. They have limited capacity and discard some pages periodically, or discard your pages if they try to "spider" your site and can't reach the server for whatever reason.
• Find out what people are looking for before you decide how to word things with GoTo Suggestions. For instance, if you put in "pet", it will show you all searches with the word pet in it done last month through the GoTo search engine. It might also be a good idea to reserve these terms through Goto, a pay-per-click search engine.
• You may want to make "portal pages." Different pages with slightly different wording to be found for different search terms. For instance, if you sell laptops, one page that uses the word laptop a lot, another that uses notebook in the same places. Then submit both. You may want to try a product like WebPosition Gold which can generate portal pages for you or rate your pages based on different search engine criteria.
  
• Make a page that links to all of your other pages for submission. Search engines sometimes "crawl" through the links on your page and index what they find on those pages as well.