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I have started on a series of articles about how you increase your amount of vistor on your site. This is the first part and in this article I will mostly talk about Web Directories and Social bookmarking.

A good way to keep track of your visitors can be to subscribe to Google Analytics which is a statistic tool for keeping statistics over visitors of a website. Sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics/
The key to many visitors is always CONTENT, you can not expect a lot of visitors if you can’t offer them anything interesting. People visit a site because they wan’t to know more. A site without interesting content won’t survive.

This article won’t cover all of the information on how to increase your visitors, but this is always a good start!

Web directories
A web directory is not a search engine and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords; instead, it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories.
Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness. Since many search engines mirrors these sites, you should really submit your site to a couple of web directories.

http://www.agilelist.com
- This is a web directory of quality pages.

http://www.dmoz.org
- This is the largest web directory completly reviewed by humans. Your submission can take up to 5 months to be accepted, but it’s worth the waiting. The DMOZ is used by allmost all of the larger search engines on the web.

There are a few other big Web directories, but they often charge a fee for reviewing your site.
How ever, here are a few big who charge from 29$ to review your site.

Yahoo Directories ( http://dir.yahoo.com )
Starting point ( http://www.stpt.com/ )
Go guides ( http://www.goguides.org/ )

There are also some semi-automatic bots for submitting your page into several Web directories. You should use these with caution since many Web Directory owners don’t appreciate this. Here is a free one: http://www.submitterbot.com

Social bookmarking
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share.
These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Social bookmarking can give you a lot of new visitors based on your content. When posting something into a social bookmarking service you should specifiy the link to a specifik article or post, not your whole site. If people find your article interesting they might read some more of what you have written.

Delicious
- This is the biggest social bookmarking service.

Digg
- Digg.com is a very populated site with categories. When signing up, you should really take the time to import your Outlook contacts etc. Due to very many submissions of articles, images and videos, an article with only 1 digg can appear very uninteresting to other people but if you can get 30 co-workers and friends to digg it, other people may follow them.

Stumbleupon
- Register at stumbleupon, download their toolbar and you are ready to go!

Reddit
- Reddit is a bit smaller than the other sites I’ve mentioned. That can actually be an advantage for the small site owner. With a smaller number of competitors, your article have a bigger chance to reach the toplists.

Forums and blogs
By being active on several different forums and blogs you can get a lot of vistors! Be nice and interested in helping others. This is a bit of social networking and if you help them, they will help you!
If someone posts a forum thread wondering what Internet Browser he should use and you have written a Internet Browser test, why don’t you link to your site? You should also participate in newer discussion, comment the last two posts on each blog you visit! You should also visit Yahoo Answer and try to answer a couple of questions with links to your site. If the sitelink is irrelevant to what the person asks, then skip this.

Link exchange
Find a webmaster in your niche, ask him if he want to participate in a link exchange, you put his link on your site and he puts yours on his. Simple, huh?

Use your contacts
Mail all your friends, relatives and co-workers and tell them about your site! This can easily give you 50-100 loyal visitors.

This was the first part of the tutorial, stay tuned for Part 2

Internet, Web development Google analytics, SEO, Tutorial, Web development