Features
The new seekers
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Build it and they will come
Alongside tailoring your site's content to readers' needs, one of the most obvious (and most often neglected) ways of bringing traffic to your site is to consider the quality of its design and structure.
Unless your audience is particularly arty, it's best to avoid flashy animations and similar features. Make your site easy to use, keep it free of clutter, don't use annoying features such as pop-ups and before adding a design element, ask what benefits it will bring to the reader. It's particularly
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The fact that there are more links pointing to your site will help people find you. In addition, in Google each link from another page to you counts as a 'vote' that boosts your PageRank value (see the 'Rank and file' box opposite). Other search engines also now measure a site's inbound links to determine how interesting that site is, so you won't just be boosting your Google rating. However, don't try and cheat the system by creating gratuitous links on other people's sites (for instance, by posting links on blogs or forums). Search engines ignore these links to your site, and may even blacklist you because of them. To see how many pages link to you, type your website's URL into Google preceded by the word link and a colon, for instance:
link:www.computershopper.co.uk.
Finally, remember that Google looks at individual pages, not entire sites; if you run a site on 1990s soft rock groups, don't be surprised if the page for the band Bare Naked Ladies gets the most hits. Links between pages also count towards your page ranking. If your site is quite small, say 20 pages, you can use a sidebar to link every page to every other page. If it's bigger than this, linking all the pages will create confusion. You should make as many relevant internal links as possible; just don't get carried away.
