Promoting My Web Page

My web site has page rank 3 according to Google. But that's only the front page. The rest of them have no page rank. So, I thought I'd try promoting my web site a little. My first stab at this was Google adwords. There isn't an enormous amount of content on my site, but there should be enough to get at least a handful of links. It costs five dollars to sign up. You get to set the cost per click (starting at as little as a penny), the maximum cost per day, and the key words that activate the ad. You can even set the CPC for each individual key word. Some of the more popular keywords don't activate without a high enough CPC. The higher the CPC, the better the position of the ad.

There is also a traffic estimator. But I didn't get even remotely accurate estimates. For the first several days, I targeted the Research Triangle Park area. I only got three impressions, and no clicks. It jumped to 27 one night - then nothing for a few days. So, I changed the target to be the whole country. But still there was no activity for at least a day. Then it jumped to 630 impressions. And still no clicks. However, today I noticed there is a commercial website carrying my ad. And Google sees it as a back link to my site. It appears as if the link is hard coded in the page somehow. It's always there every time I search for signalsguru. I'm not sure why that is at this point. My ad also comes up consistently if I search for Digital Signal Processing which is pretty amazing. I guess it's a small field.

For some reason I couldn't get to Google AdWords from my machine at work all day. I just logged in, and there have now been 2105 impressions. And I got 5 clicks. That's a very low hit rate. But I'm not selling anything; so, my ad isn't very exciting. At this point I'm thinking my front page isn't very useful. So, I've changed some of the keywords to point to my thesis page. This is going to take a more aggressive approach. Yesterday I did a little research into link exchange/buying/selling. There are many link exchange sites with various business models. Many of them seem too expensive to me. I signed up for the free

MonsterLinkSwap.com Trade links quickly and easily with thousands of other willing web sites! Our link exchange process saves countless hours in the link trade process to let you focus on what's important on your website!

Unfortunately, it's just a directory. You can search for other sites that want to do a link exchange. So I searched and found

Pro Audio Mastering Software & Music Editing Programs. Build your home recording studio with pro audio mastering and music editing software.

All I have to do now is email them and ask for a link. You can check their partners page and see if they gave me one. This page is going to be my link exchange page. If you would like to get a link, email me what to post and the web page with my link. I won't link to unrelated sites, however. Yours should be in some way related to mine. You should use the following.

Title: SignalsGuru
Link: http://www.signalsguru.net
Description: My writings about programming and Digital Signal Processing.

Links

VOIP - Voice Over Internet Protocol - Internet Voice also known as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a technology that allows you to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular phone line.

So it's been a little while, and I thought I'd make an update. First, I'm adding a link to my friend's page. By the way, from what I've read, one way links (to you) are better for your page rank than having pages that point back to the sites that point to them. I don't know if that's true, but it would make sense. Having sites that point to each other often occurs during a link exchange. And link exchanges somewhat defeat the original idea of using a citation based search engine scheme.

And speaking of link exchanges, be careful of what link exchange sites you give information to. The last one I signed up with was a directory. It allows you to solicit others for a link exchange. I've been getting spammed with requests for link exchanges from sites about viagra and penis extension. I am NOT giving them a link. (Read this page, darn it.)

I've learned a little bit more since I last wrote this. First, I never got links from the few sites I emailed. (But I'll leave their links anyway.) I don't get many clicks from my AdWords ads even though some searches bring up my ad right on Google's front page. I think part of the reason is that the words "Digital Signal Processing" don't actually show up anywhere in my ad. If you've ever paid any attention to Google's ads, they bold the relevant keywords. That makes the ad stand out more. I also don't have a very interesting ad. But, hey, I'm not selling anything -- what should I put there?

This is another update. For a few months I tried making helpful postings in Usenet with my link in my signature. I still get traffic from those links, but it's not very much. The very first time I made a post to slashdot, however, my traffic tripled or quadrupled. And it has continued to increase even though my page rank hasn't changed. It may have been a coincidence, but I'm not sure. There aren't many people reading comp.dsp. But there are a lot of people who read slashdot.