Beginners guide to starting your arcade - member contribute!

[Geo3kant]

I wanted to start this thread for beginners and noviced arcade webmasters, why? We could all use some basic or advanced information on how to market and start a new arcade.

I know how to get it started in my own country (Holland) but not as good internationaly, so i will post some of my knowledge and hopefuly you guess will too so we could get our international arcades up and running!

Google Webmaster Tools
Add your site to Google's Webmaster tools and select the geographical area you want to aim for, in my case with my new internation arcade i'm selecting the USA.

Sitemap
Add a sitemap to your site and also add it into google's webmaster tools! This is important, the bots can access the sitemap and crawl alot of links.

Linkexchange
Getting quality backlinks or linkexchanges for a starting arcade can be hard especialy if you dont have a network or previous websites that prove you got the skills. Try to get exchanges with sites who have a nice number of backlinks or PR1+, ofcourse a PR2 or 3 would be nice but it's harder to get those.

Banner exchange (traffic)
Even though i'm not a fan of them they could give your site a boost, alot of sites give you a nice bonus of 10 or 20k impressions when you sign up, these could send some nice visitors to get known.

Some good traffic banner exchange networks:
Mibbi Banner Exchange
BannerFlux

Developing Games
Developing games could not only make you money but it can generate alot of traffic too, if you're not a developer you can still get traffic but you would have to pay for it. You could sponsor a game for an amount of cash and the game will have a link to your site embedded.

SEO
If you don't know what SEO means people will ask under which rock you crawled out of, SEO means Search engine optimization. Getting your site and content optimist for the search engineS! (multiple, there's more than just google). Get good keywords and write keyword rich content.

It all may sound easy but it can be tricky, but these are some basic tactics to get traffic, i would like to hear some from you.
Would be nice to share some links!

[rirara]

Great guide! You can add game sponsoring as a separate point.

[arcadegrab]

You can add 2 more good link exchanges to the list:

http://ibannerx.com/index.php?id=81
http://exchange.waynesarcade.com/index.php?id=45

Hope you don't mind the referral links