Harness other Web sites' popularity

Get an award
Why not nominate your site for a few online trophies? A nod from one of the better-known award sites can garner plenty of traffic, not to mention the right to wear a badge of approval from the awarding site on your home page. Cool Site of the Day was one of the first sites to start handing out kudos, spawning a host of daily, weekly, and monthly award sites. You can take advantage of the fact that many of these sites depend on visitor tips to point them toward worthy candidates by submitting your own site -- to Lycos's Top Percent area, for instance.

Get reviewed
Perhaps the most rewarding recognition a site can get is a glowing review from an electronic magazine, or e-zine. The online version of The Web Magazine, for instance, is devoted almost exclusively to reviewing Web sites. Other e-zines, such as HotWired, devote special sections to sites du jour. Most e-zines have an email link in their reviews section where readers can pass along favourite URLs. For small publications, send the editor a heads-up email with your site's URL and a short description. A page of links to reviews from such sites is great PR to include on your site.

Join a Web ring
An increasingly popular way of trading links with similar sites is via Web rings, which are like Internet conga lines: each participating site is linked to a site ahead and a site behind, with the whole group forming a hyperlinked ring. There are rings devoted to hundreds of subjects, from the mundane (such as Windows Notepad users) to the obscure (such as The Discordian Ring of Fnords). A centralised Web ring site maintains the rings, adding new members, removing dead links, and establishing new rings; go there to get started.

Part one: Measuring the successs of your Web site
Part three: How search engines and directories can help your site