I used to have a well traffic website/forum (paid host, different website) and I used all those tips and I think a little more, but I never heard of the robot.txt trick. Good thinking and good guide.

greate guide, but there are more methods and even tough they aren't as efficient as some you mentioned, they do work.
1) add a link to your website in the signature of your e-mails, this way, most of your friends get to know it and if your mails are forwarded, new people might get to know and they chain has started (if you are on of those stupid people that sends a lot of 'FW: ' mails you'll quickly have a lot of people seeing your link).
2) add the link to your website in the personal message of your IM client. You'll only reach your friends by doing this, but it's a subtle way of 'advertisement'. If people see the link quite often, they'll remember it and maybe they'll mention it in a conversation.
3) open your mouth, talk to your friends, let them know your website, you can even ask your closest friends to advertise a little bit for you .
4) get a simple, short domain name. People won't remember: http://visitthiswebsitebecauseitscool.nice.com, instead make it http://cool.com .

Last but not least, make tutorials and mention your website in it

Thank you for the excellent guide! I'm new to web hosting (astahost) and I will use this guide for more traffic, but before I start, I'm upgrading my account when I have 50 points. (20 for spare)

xxxx-jozh-xxxx

PS: Is My Signature Okay, it is below?

"Hi! Visit my website/forum at http://JBITKILL.ASTAHOST.com"

This post has been edited by jbitkill: Oct 31 2007, 09:11 PM

Very good and on point tutorial. Nothing new to me but reading it reminded me I should get on the ball as far as increasing links goes.

I have never liked the whole News Letter idea, I mostly find them annoying and useless (I don't know a single person that even pays attention to them), unless they have some extremely relevant and useful information.

I like all the other ideas though, I have had a robots.txt file and been using Google Maps for quite a long time now, and also search engine submission (including direct to Google, among some free submitters lying about from time to time). I also like how you can remove unwanted links from Google (you'll see in Google Maps they occasionaly keep up links that are non-existant or no good) so anything unwanted can be asked to be removed.

I also try to have my site (just a basic text link at this point) in all my forum signatures (I have also included my newer domain that points to here in it too ).

Overall it's very good advice, I can't really think of anything else aside from if you expect a lot of traffic to a site, make it dedicated to something people want to see or use.

Wow. over the years iv been spamming on popular site. My idea was youtube. You promote your site threw a video you make. If you do it right your site will be traffic crazy =). Putting ads in google might be helpful to. I noticed that if no one is coming even after all your work then Most likely your site sucks =P Try to get into template making. Also make sure the theme of your site is good and appropriate.

thanks for the tips, the signature idea is simple and effective to get started and even better if your doing alot of posting on the net. talking of posting...

Very good thanks mate

Like this idea too so have managed to upload a picture to the server, added it to my signature but don't know how to make a link to the website on the picture. Could you help please

..i tried to promote my site..u can try feedburner service by google..u can submit ur site to google at google.com/addurl
u can add robots.txt to the meta tag in ur html coding..so dat google nd other search engines can crawl to ur site..hope dat wil help..