A web Site with no rankings and no traffic

That is what I started with: a web site with no rankings and virtually no traffic. My first web site was a Seinfeld fan site. I started StanTheCaddy.com just for fun. I was (and remain) a huge fan of the TV show Seinfeld. While I had no plans or notions of making any money from the site, I did set a lofty goal for the site: to eventually become the most comprehensive and popular Seinfeld fan site on the Internet. The year was 2000, and Seinfeld had finished its ninth and final season two years prior, in 1998. But the show was still very popular in syndicated re-runs (and still is), so I thought my goal was challenging but attainable, in time.

I registered the domain stanthecaddy.com from NameZero. The domain registration through NameZero was free, at the time. The system worked through an "URL Frame" mechanism, which means that the site contents would be opened in a frame, and the URL http://www.stanthecaddy.com would always appear in the address bar, regardless on which page or sub-page the vistor was viewing. The actual content pages of the site were not actually hosted on the stanthecaddy.com domain, but the casual visitor would not realize this. While this seems like a great setup, I would later learn otherwise - more on this later...

Aside: "Stan the Caddy" is very minor Seinfeld character who appeared in one episode. Kramer explains to the others that he has been playing golf with Stan the Caddy, and Stan has helped him transform his game. Later in the episode, Kramer takes legal advice from Stan, despite strenous protests from Jackie Chiles: "I've been practicing law for 25 years, and you're listenin' to a caddy!?!"

So, using Microsoft Publisher or Front Page (I forget which), I created a site with about 20 pages, on various Seinfeld topics. These included an episode guide, some sound clips, video clips, quotes, etc. The title of the site was "StanTheCaddy.com", go figure. I then uploaded the site to Internet and waited. Can you guess what happened? Nothing. Even though I had a good site, no one came to see it. I knew Seinfeld fans would like the site, but they weren't visiting my site.

I learned very quickly that the "build it and they will come" approach doesn't work on the web. People won't just stumble across an interesting web site. They must learn about its existance somehow. I had to get the word out somehow, to alert Seinfeld fans about my site.