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Promotion Tip:
Site Promotion With Web Rings
What do you do while you're waiting for visitors to find your new Web site? It may take them a while: search engine spiders and directory editors are so swamped with new sites that you may wait weeks - even months - before your site gets accepted.
While you're waiting, consider promoting your site with Web Rings. They're easy to include on your page, free, and can start sending traffic to your site almost instantly.
How A Web Ring Works
A Web Ring is a group of linked sites devoted to a common theme. Typically a member site has an HTML footer at the bottom of the home page. Visitors navigate through the ring by clicking on the "previous" and "next" buttons on the banner. It's possible to navigate through the entire ring and end up back at the original site by clicking on either button repeatedly, hence the term "Web Ring."
Joining a Web Ring is a pretty easy process. Just contact the RingMaster and ask to have your site included in the ring. Once you've been accepted, the RingMaster will send you a line of HTML code that links you to the Web Ring. Place that code on your Web page - usually at the bottom - and you're a member.
Find A Ring That Fits
With so may thousands of active Web Rings, it's important to make sure you find the best one for your site. It's like submitting to a search directory: success is dependent on submitting to the proper category (or Ring in this case). Drill down through the Web Ring host's directory to find the most relevant category and Web Ring before you apply for membership.
The two largest Web Ring hosts contain thousands of Rings:
Although you can join multiple Web Rings, remember that you have to include a banner for each one on your page. Too many Web Ring memberships may give you a banner list that's longer than your page content!
With This Ring - You Get Traffic
Because membership numbers change daily, it's impossible to determine exactly how many sites are Web Ring members - or even how many Web Rings exist! However, RingSurf hosts approximately 14,000 Web Rings with over 140,000 member sites. Yahoo has an even larger network of rings and member sites.
Why so many? Web Rings are a cheap and easy way to deliver targeted traffic to your Web site. Suppose you have a Web site devoted to King Arthur lore. A search on Google for the keyword phrase "King Arthur" returns 784,000 results - not all of them applicable to the legendary British king. One of the top 5 is the King Arthur Flour site!
Searchers looking for the historical King Arthur may quickly get frustrated wading through the results and never find your King Arthur site. But if you joined Yahoo's Knights of Excalibur Web Ring, you would be one of just 36 sites devoted to the topic.
Visitors who find your site by navigating through a Web Ring are already interested in your topic and likely to spend more time at your site. The best, largest Web Rings act like specialized search engines where visitors can immediately find relevant sites.
Pro And Con
We've already discussed the main advantage of Web Ring membership: highly targeted traffic from visitors interested in your topic or products.
There are other benefits:
- Fast: You get traffic to your Web site even before the search engines index it.
- Free: You just have to spend time researching them to find the best for your site.
- Easy: They're simple to create and to join.
- Connect with others: Non-commercial and advocacy sites use them as a grassroots-networking tool.
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Naturally, there are drawbacks too:
- Credibility: Many Web professionals consider Web Ring banners the mark of an amateur site so you may risk your credibility with some visitors.
- Lack of maintenance: Web Rings that aren't maintained regularly often contain a lot of broken links - especially Rings of non-commercial sites. Make sure your RingMaster keeps the Ring updated.
- Membership Limits: Some Web Ring hosts limit the number of rings you can join or have a minimum size for a Web Ring. If you're a member of a Web Ring devoted to a really esoteric topic like Bonsai Clubs, you may surprised to find that your host has deleted the Ring.
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The most serious concern for commercial sites is the potential to direct traffic directly to their competitors. However, the traffic generated through a Web Ring is almost always highly targeted so it may be of higher quality than more generic search engine traffic.
Web Rings aren't a replacement for search engine submission and optimization. But for new sites, the alternative to visitors from Web Rings may be no visitors at all. Certainly, if you have a new site that hasn't been picked up by search engines yet, a relevant Web Ring or two may start generating traffic right away.
Try this free promotion alternative while you're working on your other, long-term promotion strategies.
Remember: you can't just sit back and wait for search engine spiders to find your site - you have to invite them! NetMechanic's Search Engine Power Pack helps you with every aspect of search engine promotion: selecting keywords, writing META tags, optimizing your page content, submitting and tracking your site.
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