Awards can work wonders when it come to building interest in your Web site, or they can also be just mementos that you can place in a glass case to tout your achievements.  The truth is that displaying your awards prominently will not build traffic to your Web site, nor will the number of awards displayed. Presently, it seems everyone is offering a Web award of some form or another.  There are many variations of Cool Site of the Day awards. The Cool awards include Cool Site of the Moment, Cool Site of the Hour, Cool Site of the Week, Cool Site of the Month, and the Cool Site of the Year too. In addition to the cool site awards, there are the Hot Site of the Day, Hour, Week, Month and Year awards. Next comes the Crazy Site of the Day, Hour, Week, Month and Year. So many awards are on the Web that novices have started offering Backward Awards including the Mediocre Site of the Day, Ugly Site of the Day and the Bottom 95 percent of the Web.

TIP:  If your site wins multiple awards, why not create an awards page.

If displaying your awards or the number of them does not matter, then what does? The true equalizers are the fundamental meaning of the award and the power of the award giver’s  announcement vehicle.  When an organization such as PC Magazine acknowledges your Web site as one of the Top 100 of the year, you can anticipate your traffic to soar.  The reason for this is not necessarily the award itself as the importance of the award and the channels through which it is made known.

PC Magazine is very respected in the business.  The Top 100 of the Year award is given to sites only after methodical research and exhaustive review.  The list of recipients of the Top 100 is published in PC Magazine, which has over a million readers.  Not only do they publish the list in its print edition, PC Magazine publishes the list in its online addition where it is available to the Web society throughout the year.  The durability of the print edition together with the continued traffic to PC Magazine’s Web site and Top 100 list itself are what drives traffic to the Web sites of the recipients.

NOTE:  Another way to achieve notoriety is to create your own award.  The more sites that you give your award to the more links there will be pointing back to your Web site and the higher your Web site’s ranking will become.  Just be aware that creating and maintaining this award site will be a lot of work.  Formal criteria for judging Web sites and add supporting Web pages to your site to manage the award process is a must.  You will also have to handle all the entries that you may receive. Setting aside time to go surfing and looking for sites that you can offer the award to will be needed if the entries do not measure up.