Creating or Joining a Webring
A webring is a group of websites that are linked together and, generally, are all related by a common topic or theme. When you view a website that is part of a webring, you can click through easily to another site that is part of the ring. If you continue clicking through to the next website in the ring, you will eventually return to the site at which you started. This circular structure is where the "ring" in webring comes from.
Uses of a Webring
Making Research Easier
A webring can make learning about a specific topic easier by linking a great deal of information together through the various sites that make up the ring. By clicking through multiple related sites, surfers can find what they're looking for and may even get a useful range of perspectives on the topic they're researching.
Building an Online Community
For many topics and special interests, there are strong communities online. There may be well established websites that are considered particular authorities on your topic, and joining a webring with them can help you to become a part of the existing online community. Your site can also get a boost in its perceived authority because it is connected to other sites that users respect.
Increasing Traffic to Your Website
The webring structure also makes it easy for users to discover additional sites that may be of interest to them. Rather than going back again and again to a search engine to find more resources on a topic, a surfer can follow the ring to a selection of relevant sites. When it's your website that users are discovering through inclusion in a ring, you're building traffic to your website! In this way, joining a webring can be a great way to increase the number of people visiting your website.
Joining or Creating Webrings with Freeservers
You can add your website to an existing ring easily. When you use web hosting services from Freeservers, you can also create your own webring. It's simple to do; get started by creating the small navigation bar and adding it to your page. This creates a ring that you can then invite other webmasters to join. They will use this navigation bar to link to your site as well as the other members of the ring. Your new webring can benefit both you and the sites that join it by increasing the number of visitors that come to all the websites involved.
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