I've had a number of PMs from members asking how we can attract more visitors to our community so I've been waiting until the new look has been released to put together some artwork for a banner.
Links to us from other websites across the Internet are very important to us so we can grow from strength to strength and make people aware we are here.
How can you help?
Some members already do this and I take my hat off to them as we are getting a number of referrals because of them.
Signature Links
One of the most popular ways is to put a link to our site into your signature on other forums you visit. Before doing this though, take a quick look at their T&Cs to make sure they allow linking first.
Most forums use similar BBCode so you should be able to simply copy and paste the following code into your signature:
[url]http://www.phototopix.co.uk[/url]
You can also use the link available at the top of this page:
http://www.phototopix.co.uk/referrers.php. This includes your member number so if anyone joins up, we will record you were the referrer!
Banners
Over the next few weeks I'll be releasing a number of banners in all shapes and sizes so you can include them on your own personal websites and other personal pages you may have.
Banner 1 (468x60)
Copy the following HTML code into your web pages:
HTML Code:
<a href="http://www.phototopix.co.uk" target="_phototopix"><img src="http://www.phototopix.co.uk/banner1.jpg" alt="PhotoTopix Photography Community!" border="0" /></a>
Why will links help?
You will already know the obvious one, people see them, click on them and they visit the site. What you may not know (warning: technical information coming) all websites are ranked and in google terms it's called PR, Page Ranking. PR (0-No Rank to 10-High Rank) is used to determine how important a site is when you get your search results back from google.
If we have links on lots of sites that have a PR of 3/4 or more then google will push us closer to the top of the search results and we are found easily. There is also a term used between sites for this too which is "Ranking Wars". Although not really a war, it's a race to get your site listed in the first few lines of a search result.
We currently have a page rank of
0 but I hope to see a change soon with everyones help.
Overtime the effect linking will have for us will make all of the content appear hopefully on the first search page when people search for certain content and this will drive a lot more new members to our community.
I hope I've not baffled you with the last bit and please link to us wherever you can. Seeing results from linking is not an overnight process and can sometimes take months to see the effect on google, yahoo etc. but it will be such a benefit to the site to see us going up the ranks.
If you have any questions, we are always keen to provide you with answers so please let us know what they are.
Thanks for your support.
[UPDATE 15/01/2008] - We have now hit google PR of 1 for our homepage.
[UPDATE 16/01/2008] - We have now hit google PR of 2 for our homepage.