Although web awards are never a truly big deal by current standards established by major television events like the Grammy’s or the Oscars, they are actively sought by web developers and small businesses online for their efforts.
We all love to be recognized and applauded by our peers for our creative efforts. Web site owners are certainly not exempt from this desire. Some go overboard with their applications and display awards from some of the smallest and most insignificant of presenters. Receiving the “Best of the Rest” award won’t accomplish anything other than increasing the load time of your awards page. Display only those awards you can be truly proud of in order to impress your visitors.
WebSite101 has been recognized as a “Best Of The Web” site by Surfers Choice! We’ve applied more than once for this honor and are very excited to have received the recognition from one of the top awards offered online. Being listed on their winners list is second only to our recognition by Entrepreneur Magazine as a valuable small business resource.
For those of you who wish to increase traffic, both winning and presenting awards bring great benefits to your web site and can increase site traffic dramatically. There is wonderful resource called the DVWorksheet at
http://websiteawards.xe.net/ that lists – and links to – over 600 awardsites worldwide! That’ll keep you busy for awhile.
Why is this such a popular thing to do?
Most awards require links back to their site when they reward you with that award. Some award sites require verification and provide certification numbers. All of that linking increases the search engine relevancy and popularity of the award site. But the award site most often links back to all the sites they have honored as well and this does the winner even more good.
The high traffic award sites often send more traffic to their awardees and thus increase applications at those sites listed and linked as winners. This never ending spiral of linking and awarding is the driving force behind much of that activity. It is another traffic generator for all awarding and all winning sites. Some awards are created just for this reason and are quite often meaningless as awards because they are given to all comers.
Focus Associates’ AwardSites.com is another recognized award center. This one is different than most in that it honors the best internet awards and ranks them among their peers for quality. WebSite101 has been rated by Focus Associates as a “Select Member” of their listed WebSite Awards so that applicants know the award we present represents true quality.
Our traffic analysis shows that many of our applicants come to us from “AwardSites” and others come from the DVWorksheet, both cited above.
WebSite101 believes in and supports only quality awards and offers our A+ Award to only the sites that meet our listed criteria.
We apply only to those sites that we believe offer the best awards that are meaningful to display. That’s the reason we proudly display the Surfers Choice Best of the Web Award on our front page.
We encourage others to apply by hosting the Surfers Choice Directory submission page at http://www.website101.com/scdmv07.html . If you get listed in the directory, apply for the award. It’s a good one.
If you are interested in the WebSite101 A+ Award for small business self designed websites, visit our application page at http://www.website101.com/Award.html and see if you can qualify for what we hope will become a highly coveted award among small business webmasters. We do require a link back to WebSite101, but we link to you as well. Good luck!
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at http://RealitySEO.com
where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.
