Besides search engines and directories, how to you discover new websites?

Friends tell me

Don't know, no one seems to be discovering my blog. I'm scared to think that if I buy the domain name I'll have absolutely no visitors.

For the most part I think that the majority of traffic is generated from search engines...yet for the life of me, no matter my key word brilliance, no one is finding my blog.

Domain names are well worth buying. The longer you have a domain name the better it is also.

Don't search for a website. just search for words. Any word. You gonna hit by million of websites.

But, what other way do you discover new websites?

One of the rules, otherwise I would have advertised it ages ago.

http://inmyparentsbasement--gaming.blogspot.com/

The problem is that I manage about three of them, but at least the above blog actually belongs in this section.

I have six sites (well, one site, six parked domains), all listed in the search engines, but they're lost amongst the millions of others listed.

I do plan on doing some AdWord campaigns, but was looking for other ways to promote them, maybe even ways I haven't thought of yet. I also plan on doing some offline advertising, making up business cards, etc.

I was also wondering if people actually use things like social bookmarking.

I thought of doing an AdWord campaign too, but from what I've seen in the professional web development area it is almost useless unless you have an already popular site.

What I'm doing now is just linking out to other websites/blogs in the hopes that they link back to me. Also post stories straight from one site to the other in a linksharing attempt, so far failure, but I'm going to stick with this blog until I simply cannot salvage it.

i stumble upon websites through other websites or by word of mouth from friends or family

Four of my domains recently got de-indexed in Google. Not that they were doing good there, but it does hurt a little. I can relist them once once I fix them. I think it was for duplicate content, because they're parked domains.

Whatever you do not duplicate content and becareful of the sites you link to. Linking to bad/banned sites can hurt your ranking. Auto-generated content is bad also.

Thankfully my main site is OK. I did remove the links to the other sites, just to be safe, and I noticed a slight increase in the page rank.

Pretty much the only links out I do is to well-known video game sites, or another blog on Blogger. Aside from that due to Google's TOS contract I'm iffy about linking to anything I don't really know.

I stumble upon them by accident because I suck at searching!

I've been totally resisting replying to this topic, but if you guys need some SEO pointers, feel free to contact my via mail. I've been in that game for quite a while, and have had some success at it.

All kinds of random browsing on the interwebs!

the internet...j/k

i click on the links that are on the sites that i'm on....

tech talk shows on t.v.

radio broadcasts of interviews etc.


it really depend what you are looking for ...

personal sites are a dime a million ... these days.

I've had up to 12 sites or more on various free site providors for years.

They don't get viewed much without links in social networking sites and a lot of self promotion.

if there is little of value on them but chit chat ...
what do you expect to happen with them?

Mine were to promote my art .. but have not sold anything for me in 14 years. ... so ... I don't have big expectations of any blog.
Infact for years I refused to use this blog thing ... because I had real websites.

and they are still on google. just google "thorbart"

you need to put key words that have some uniqueness to you in your
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT .. and DESCRIPTION .... sections of your webpage header.

StumbleUpon is a personalized search engine..its pretty nifty, Ive come across some websites that I would otherwise never have discovered before...it also allows you to share your findings by linking to your own web pages...

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

LOL, I have a stumbleupon account. It must be very very old, I don't even remember joining.