You guys/ladies have been so helpful as I've gotten my site up and running.  I'm happy with the site so far, but I can't help but get discouraged at times that I get so few visitors to the site.  I've read through the forums here at LP, as well as spent time at adminzone looking for ways to improve traffic to my site and forum.  Here's what I have done so far...can you tell me if you see something missing/something I could improve?

Contacted other related sites (but not competitors) and asked to do reciprocal links.  So far, no go. Every day I look around for new sites and contact a few of them. For some reason no one is getting back to me??

Worked on my metatags and description/title.  Should I add more?

Update my content regularly and try to provide quality, relevant information

Respond to forum posts every day and try to create new ones that add content and (hopefully) generate discussion

Have a link on my signatures on forums I frequent.  I periodically post on those boards as well to advertise the site (in a tasteful way)

Have told friends and family about the site

Submitted to major search engines

I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of anything else right now.

It's a non-profit site, so that makes it especially discouraging that no one's coming.  It's not that I expect a free pass or anything just because it's non-profit, but the money and effort I've put into it make it a little extra-discouraging.  I know that people could benefit from the site and I know there are people out there who it could help. But right now, the only google search that results in my site is: fussy babies Vancouver BC

www.fussybaby.ca

Any ideas?

Holly

How long has your site been online, since last May? If so, that's not very long.  Your site is in the Google index (Search for site:www.fussybaby.ca), and that's good. It can take quite a long time, by which I mean 1 year from launch, or longer, meaning 2 years... to build any significant amount of traffic from search engines. One reason sometimes proposed is called the Google "sandbox" effect. A web search on that will turn up quite a lot of information and debate.   

Judging by the Google results for fussy baby, you are in a very competitive niche. Oddly enough,  some of the sites have names that are nearly identical to yours.

So it could take a while for you to be noticed.  In the meantime, use your time to continue creating helpful articles. 

Your page names have spaces in them. Are you on a Windows server? I didn't even think you could do that in Linux.

Your images have references like file:///C|/Documents and Settings/..., which can't be right on Linux. If that's how the Windows servers work, no problem. If not, then the images would appear to be pointing to your home computer, which would have to be fixed since no one but you would be able to see them.

As far as keywords, descriptions, and titles go, I wouldn't have any trouble figuring out what your site is about.

If you're getting even a handful of visitors a day, that's not so bad for a site that's only a couple of months old. It can be frustrating. The things that you're doing that you described in your post are all the right things.

Thanks Steve, for the ideas.  I changed all my file names to one word names...I'm not sure how it let me have those long names with spaces!  I hear what you're saying about the images, I think.  But when I click on the image properties it doesn't show them as document relative names (I'm not sure if I used that term right, but hopefully you know what I mean!). 

And here's something weird...as of yesterday, when I typed in www.fussybaby.ca into google, I got a list of all my pages...today I only get my home page and forum.  Any idea why?

Ok, having another look I see that most of your images do have references like <img src="images/...", which is correct. The ones that refer to "Documents and Settings" are all your spacer.gif images, which FrontPage (or maybe Expressions Web?, or ImageReady?, never heard of that one) uses to adjust the heights or widths of table cells.

To see what I'm talking about, go to your site, and then in your browser click Page > View Source. This will show the source code for your page as it was given to your browser.

If you're on a Linux server, note also that your filenames are case-sensitive, so if your file name is Articles.html, for example, you must always use exactly that capitalization. If the server gets a request for articles.html, it will return a "Page Not Found" error. Most people use all lower case, and no embedded spaces.

The naming changes you made don't appear to be consistent throughout your site. For example, you appear to have the following two pages, that go to the same place. Maybe you are redirecting one of them to the other?

http://www.fussybaby.ca/Coping.html
http://www.fussybaby.ca/Coping%20with%20Fussiness.html

That kind of jumping up and down in Google is quite normal, especially for a new site. One reason, among probably many, is that Google has 50+ data centers from which it retrieves data for results pages. Not all the data centers have exactly the same data, so the results you see can depend on which center your query was sent to.   

However, the renaming of pages that you're doing is going to affect how you look in Google for a while, because while Google was aware of the old names, these new names will be brand new to it, so as the old pages drop out of the index, it will be a while before the new ones are added. 

Thus, the current time, while your site is brand new and you can't really expect a lot of traffic anyway, is the perfect time to sort out the structural problems in your site. After you become established, making changes like this will be quite detrimental unless you also put into place a whole bunch of redirects that redirect each old page name to its corresponding new one.   

So get this out of the way now.  You didn't say whether you're on a Windows server.  If you are on linux, make all your file names linux-friendly, and make sure you revise the name in every single reference on every single page, consistently throughout the site. 

The blogger idea is a great one.  One I wanted to suggest is daycares/schools.  The important thing is to not think of it as a link exchange but rather a partnership.  Get a list of local daycares/schools that have web pages that aren't junk.  Give them a call and ask to come sit with them so you can show them a website that is free and can give useful advice to their parents.  If you develop a relationship with them then they will be much more likely to link to you AND they are nice "related but not competitors" sites for the search engines to use to determine the value of your pages.

It's also a good place to see if you can put a flyer if they have a bulletin board.  The daycare I'm involved with has some useful information out front from various trusted sources.  If you can establish yourself with them as a legit (non-flakey) person offering good advice to parents then they will probably let you do something.  Spend $30 and get some of those pens with your website's name on them and have the daycare use them in the office and if a parent snags one then great... or they could even offer them for free -- any kind of non-electronic ads in the right hands would be good.  Don't limit yourself to just search engines.

You could even, depending on the size of your town, check with baby stores... your imagination is your best tool.  Just imagine who would be involved with someone needing your information.  A pediatrician's office would be another place, or OB/GYN for the expectant mothers worried about having a fussy baby.  The sky's the limit!