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Connections
Connecting your site to others that have similar content, or are simply appealing to you is a good way to make friends and influence visitors.
There are a number of powerful means of getting connected including:
- Exchanging links:
Simply contact another site owner and offer to put a link to them in exchange for them doing the same.
- Joining webrings:
Webrings are organized lists of sites that all recommend one another. Go to the webring org. to join up.
- Listing your site on community-lists:
Yahoo and others offer useful listings of sites grouped by their type and content, under many community headings, Submit your site to as many as possible.
- Alexa's suggest sites:
Go to Alexa's website and install their free "smart" browsing assistant. It does a lot to improve your
browsing and has a large database of recommended similar sites. This is a (partially) built in function on Netscape 4 and above.
- Add a message board:
Like chatrooms, but more permanent and and great for feedback on your site and topics and general discussion, message boards are a great way to generate
interest and hold discussions, and they bring your visitors back! Get your free message board at Inside The Web.
- Adding chatrooms:
Easy to set up and install, there are several chat-room suppliers out there who will add a custom room for visitors from your website to their systems for you.
Nicest of all, they are free! Try Beseen.com to get one! They are also a good way to get new information,
and earn loyal visitors but require more attention and promotion.
The importance of linking your site to others cannot be ignored, as many Search Engines use the number of connections to and from a webpage as a guage of it's relevancy! This can mean the differnce between being in the top 1000 or the top 10 of a search result listing. Links are not a solution without their own headaches. The web is constantly changing as pages and whole sites come and go, so it's important to keep track of the site's you have linked yours to! SevenTwentyFour.com offers a free monitoring service that will notify you periodically of any stale links it finds, as well as a more advanced subscription service. Some software programs such as Linkbot will do a similar job from your desktop, providing you have a high speed internet connection.
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