Entries Tagged 'Banners' ↓

Here’s the thing.

To get placed more highly in a Google search (who doesn’t want that?), you need to make Google think you’ve got a damned fine site. The higher the PR (Page Rank) you’ve got, the better a site Google thinks you’ve got, and the higher you will come up in a search for your chosen keywords.

One of the ways you do this is by getting links from other sites like yours.

One of the things Google looks at when deciding how good a site you have is incoming links. They look at how many sites are linking to you and what kind of sites they are. The people who wrote the algorithm decided that the more highly ranked sites you have linking to your site, the better quality your site is.

So if you’ve got a site that lots of people with good sites think their readers will want to read, they’ll link to you and you may get a boost out of this. The best way to do this is to start by having quality content on your site. Update your content regularly and people will return to see what’s new. They’ll give you links.

Of course, there are other ways to get links. Some sites will trade links with you. Google looks at links like this and sees that they are reciprocal, which means the two sites link to each other. A link like this is not worth as much to Google, but you may get some good traffic out of it.

When you make a reciprocal link, you should place the site’s link at least as well as they have placed yours. So if they link to your front page, you can link to their front page. If they’ve got a “links” page, you can put their link on your links page or on your front page. But be nice. Don’t hide their link someplace on your site if they are giving you a link to your front page. I have offered to trade links with girls who wanted me to link to their front page, while they were putting my link on a page that was behind a tiny text link. Another girl offered me a link on a password-protected page that nobody but flirts whose banners were on the page had the password to.

It’s the same with topsites. If they want you to host their image, then upload it to your site and link to the image there. Otherwise, use the code they gave you and put the link on the page you gave them.

Here’s a banner for this site:

The url for the image is
http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif.
The code for linking is
<a href="http://help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>

I had to type that out in strange characters for you to see that. In order for the linking code to actually show up the way they need to copy it, you need to either type it in special html characters, format it with <pre></pre> tags:
<pre><a href="help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a></pre>

your linking code

See how I didn’t actually put the linking code in there? This one doesn’t work in WordPress.

Or you can put it in a textarea. “Cols” is the number of columns. Put more to make the textarea wider. “Rows” is the number of rows. You can increase or decrease, but you want the entire code to show without too much wasted white space.
<textarea cols="40" rows="3"><a href="http://help4flirts.com"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>
<a href="http://help4flirts.com/"><img src="http://help4flirts.com/banners/banner.gif" border="0"></a>

You can use any of these in an html page. You can’t use the ‘pre’ tags in WordPress.

If you’ve never made a banner, there’s a few things you should know. I’m not going to tell you how to make a banner image now. That’s something you would do in your image program, and there are so many options I couldn’t tell you what to do. If you have an image program but don’t know how to use it, I suggest getting a nice, thick book to help you with that.

First of all, a banner is a 468×60 image, in other words, it is 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels high. This is the standard size. Most topsites require you to submit a banner this size to their site and reject any other size or shape.

When designing a banner, keep in mind that this is the advertisement that your potential customer will be seeing when deciding whether to visit your site and/or call you. It needs enough information to give them a reason to click it. If you don’t have a website, you may want to put a phone number on, so that someone who can’t call right now can write it down to call you later.

But you don’t want too much information. The space is small, and it should be the colors and images that catch the attention of the surfer.

It also needs to be attractive and sexy, so most banners have photos and some sort of effect.

Most banners are animated because animated images are more eye-catching and you can put more info on a banner if it is animated in two or three frames. Just make sure you test your banner before putting it out on the web. Someone who reads relatively slowly should still be able to read all text on the banner. If your text goes by too fast, they won’t be able to read it at all! Slow down your animation if you need to. Each frame can be assigned its own speed in a good animation program.

The last consideration is that many toplists host banners, and some of them – I’m thinking Phone Sex Central here – have a very low filesize they require, in order to keep their site from loading slowly. More frames, images, and effects mean a larger filesize. You may not be able to make your first, second, or third choice and still stay within the limit. Design is an art, and skills come with practice. Good luck.