Ask HN: What can I do to improve my website?

1. Posting on HN

2. Email all your favorite bloggers

3. Email TechCrunch (you may get lucky with a ten second email)

4. Go onto the correct types of forum and advertise (possibly Second Life forums?)

Now, if you are just interested in getting some traffic, you can:

1. Ask your friends to post the link on their social media sites

2. Pay some myspace dudes with tens of thousands of friends $50 bucks to message all of their friends a note you have written (including the link of course)

3. Go onto Second Life and pay advertisers to advertise for you

4. Eh, Google Adsense

Well, that's all I can think of off the top of my head.

search - paid or organic

links - from anywhere, anyone

type in - people going to your site directly, often connected to offline advertising

you're probably best of scaling one/both of the first two options.

organic seo rankings is going to take time, you should spend maybe couple hours a day building links to your site for keywords you think are most relevant.

paid search (sem) is another scalable and faster strategy. it's not 'hands off' and requires you to create (well ok, not requires, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND) some landing pages optimized to each keyword and drive traffic to them. It's a math game, clicks * price per click < your margin * conversion rate. YOU WILL LOSE MONEY. You will also learn and improve if you do this properly and can find keywords where you can meet that basic criteria.

as far as getting links... there is the tried and true for SEO purposes: article marketing, directory marketing, social commenting. But don't forget the real purpose of those links back in the day was to actually DRIVE traffic. I saw some creative ways here about having myspace messages, same with twitter, facebook, etc. The best advice I can give you here is MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO LINK YOU. Create some compelling and interesting content. (checkout mint's strategy http://jasonputorti.com/post/472866002/how-mint-com-acquired...)

Good luck.

As far as the site content and navigational structure go, does anyone have any comments? Thanks brianlash for the compliment - I do wholeheartedly stand behind our product.

A big issue is that of conversion. Our jump rate is about 70% right now; it was 80% before the switch to Wordpress, which is a good sign. Still, our conversion is ~0.1% currently, I would estimate.

That stuff has its place in test prep, but there's a strong case for balance between theory and strategy. I really appreciated your materials for that.