I have a writer's site, but am not getting much traffic....
What should I do?

I've been publishing sites for years and own www.naturalfamilyonline.com that serves over 90,000 visitors a month. I'm not an expert, but I do have a few answers. For an expert, follow the links I've listed at the bottom of this note.

If you're not getting traffic, most likely you have no backward links registered yet. Google and other search engines have not "crawled" your site and assigned you a page rank yet. Or maybe they have been on your site with their little "robots" but still your page rank is so low you're still not being seen.

The absolute BEST thing you can do is get your link out to anywhere you can. Start searching author's sites for links pages and get a link exchange going. Ask people on your groups to exchange with you.

Eventually as search engines crawl a few of those higher ranking author's sites it will find your link and "index" you. This way when I search for your name online I will find your site first to be able to contact you.

Make sure your site clearly uses your name several times in it's links and content.

BUT in order for you to get a higher search engine ranking and therefore get more traffic through meta tags and other content on your site, you will need a much bigger site with tons of content on its pages. You can find content all over the Internet. One source is a fairly exclusive paid content site geared towards getting moms to your site. Check out All Mom Content.

For content that is all about you, there are several ideas. You could put stories on there, excerpts, industry news, links and resources, mini classes written by you, newsletter archives, essays and articles written by you or others, etc... It all takes time.

If all that is important is getting your name to pop up when we search you, then just get your links out there to other sites and get your name on your site in several areas.

Remove all the bells and whistles like buttons for your navigation at top, side and bottom and use just plain links instead. This will increase the search engine's ability to get to all areas of your site, not just the home page.

Also, since blogs are published online the moment you put out the post, get a free blog (or a paid one) from Blogger.com, xanga.com, typepad.com or any other and put your website's link on the blog's template. Wordpress is also free and you can set it up on your OWN domain and show it from your own website yet have things publish immediately! Heck, you can even use the wordpress software AS your website.

Publish regular blog posts telling people what you're up to. Get that blog link into other people's sites as well. Publish pages of your website into different posts of your blog. This will all increase immediate traffic.

How to learn about SEO

If you have time, motivation and a will to really make your site stand out, take the free SEO course or buy the affordable ebook at:
www.gnc-web-creations.com/seo-optimization.htm
www.gnc-web-creations.com/seo-techniques.htm