How to promote your website for free

the rules of the web

check if your site is worthwhile and if your title/description is attractive enough

these can give you also additional visitors and links to your web site

awards and sites of the day/week (etc)

There are numerous awards, new awards come up and others disappear. Some bring you many additional visitors. On this page, I have kept record of the visitors to The Book of Clichés and indicated what awards (or other things) gave a visible change in the number of visitors. (the USA Today Award for The Book of Clichés gave me more than 1,000 extra visitors on that day). Other awards will hardly make a difference. But anyway, your site will be on a list of award winners, and that is what you want: people can find your website.

For most of the awards you have to nominate yourself, that is a lot of work, but hey, you want to promote your website, don't you ?

The best way to find out about awards is to check the awards other websites have won. These usually link back to the website of the award-giver. There you can nominate yourself.
Web awards come in flavors, usually the award giver explains what kind of websites he prefers. There is a big difference between the Useless Pages and the Cool Site of the Day.
After nominating your site for an award, you can nominate yourself for other awards. Finding a next award is easy: check out some winners of the award you just nominated yourself for. They probably won other awards too. And there you go again !

So, here is not a list of awards, but just some points your start your search for awards. It is really hard to keep track of all the awards on the net, so don't be too disappointed when links are outdated or when awards stopped giving out new awards.

  • Karen's Award Links, a large list of web awards
  • The Award Ring, where only sites with 5 or more award can be part of
  • Winners of the HeyYouSir's Award Award, an award for awards
  • Best of the Best! Sites that maintain Cool/Hot linklists!

    and some pages with over 100 awards: | McLaughlin's Place | The Lady of Passion and Mystery | Crystal's Homepage |

    If you can not seem to win any award, consider starting an award yourself.

    URL contests

    URL contests
    You can add your URL and others can chose it (or sometimes decide it has to disappear from the list). Each choice is registered and changes the contents of the page.

  • League of Links
  • Recyclinx, last time I visited it, this did not work very well.

    voting contests
    Visitors can vote for your page and after a certain period of time the number of votes for each site is counted. The results are shown, the best join the Hall of Fame and or get an award.

  • Rodeo of Links
  • Fight of the Sites

    ratings/reviews
    Several sites on the net offer the possibility to get your site reviewed/rated.

  • Yahoo
  • Geocities