Editor's note: This is the ninth in a 12-part, "hands-on" series about the wonderful world of adult Website building. The resulting site will have been built by real people who have no Web-building experience and no inside experience in the adult industry. Their names have been changed to protect their real identities and their mainstream business interests.
After "money," the two words insiders most often associate with the adult Net are "traffic" and "promotion," in that order.
Traffic is essential; no Website can exist profitably without it. Most adult Webmasters spend the majority of their time trying to get it and increase it. Those with plenty to spare spend a good deal of time trying to sort it and send it where it will make more money for them.
Though they may understand its importance, new Webmasters often have trouble figuring out how to get traffic of their own. In addition, when they start having some success, they quickly discover that attracting lots of traffic - unless it's dedicated to buying the goods and services they have to offer - results in nothing more than an increasing bandwidth bill and a negative bottom line.
That's why promotion and traffic are tied so closely together. Promotion can create traffic, but it's savvy, Web-wise promotion that will garner the kind of traffic a Webmaster needs to go from red to black ink on his or her balance sheet.
The first and most obvious way to promote a site is to get it listed in search engines and directories. The two are slightly different in the way they gather information, but many tips and tricks that apply to one apply to the other. Search engines generally send out "spiders," or automated software robots, to crawl the Web and find new sites for them. Google is an example of a search engine. Directories, on the other hand, often are hand-indexed, meaning site owners submit their URLs and site descriptions, then human beings check the site and add it to the appropriate categories within the directory. Yahoo! is a directory. That is not to say that submitting sites to search engines is a bad idea - on the contrary, it often results in more prompt listing than waiting for a spider to find a site on its own.
It goes without saying that the higher a site ranks in a search, the better chance it has of getting traffic from that search. Mainstream engines are still the No. 1 way surfers look for what they're interested in finding, and not coincidentally, they're the hardest in which to receive a high ranking.
Though some mainstream engines now accept "pay-per-click" placement in their categories, the importance of META tags cannot be overstated in generating high rankings in mainstream search engines. Among the META tags, "Name," "Keywords," and "Description" are of primary importance. Try to include as many descriptive keywords and keyword phrases in each of those META tags as possible, without overtly "padding." Perceived padding, either in META tags or in the body of a page itself, can cause a search engine spider not only to skip over a page, but also to blacklist it and the site to which it belongs. Including irrelevant keywords - those that have nothing to do with the page on which they appear - is another no-no. Irrelevant keywords not only cause problems with search engines (and especially directories), but lead to unnecessary bandwidth increases when surfers visit the site looking for something specific, find it's not there, and leave without buying anything else. In no case should META tags include copyrighted or trademarked keywords, unless the site is officially affiliated with the holders of those copyrights or trademarks or has the permission of their holders to use them. Copyright and trademark attorneys are vigorous in defending their clients' possessions, and disputes over infringement have caused more than one Website to close.
META tags need to be on every page of a site, not just the home page. Different tags on different pages can result in pages showing up with different rankings depending on the search terms a user enters, and often help sites garner the attention of surfers who otherwise might not visit them.
Doing a good job with META tags takes a great deal of time. They should be adjusted almost constantly until a site achieves a search engine ranking with which the site owner is comfortable, usually within the top 20. After that, site owners and designers need to check their rankings constantly to ensure their sites maintain these rankings. When a ranking starts to fall, it's time to make significant changes in the keywords in order to bump it back up again. Examine the keywords used by competing sites, especially those that appear in the top five spots in the lists on which you aspire to a prominent ranking.
SE Guru maintains some excellent resources for increasing search engine hits at his SearchEngine Matrix, www.searchenginematrix.com/setools.html.
Each mainstream search engine is different, and it pays to spend some time reading the criteria, terms, and conditions attached to listing in each of the majors before submitting sites to them. That is equally true for adult-specific search engines and directories, which also are excellent means of directing traffic to a site. Many adult search engines and directories accept pay-per-click payment for placement in the top spots for certain search terms, and this can be a very reasonable advertising expense.
Link popularity, or the number of other sites that link to it, is another item considered by some search engines and directories when they rank a site. Some also take into consideration the number of outgoing links from a site. That's where link lists, link exchanges, and banner exchanges come in handy.
Next: Copping Traffic.
Previously: Help is where you find it.
