Triple Your Banner Click-Through Rates

Have you noticed that your banner ads rarely get clicked on? Banner ads used to be a very effective method of advertising, but the web has become bloated with banner after banner. As a result they're largely ignored today.
But did you know there is a simple and effective way to get people to click on your banners?
The click-through-rates of text links is roughly 4 times that of banner ads. Text links tend to give a prospective customer more useful information about the link and less hype. And with a text link you avoid the headaches that you get when staring at flashing banners.
Of course the main problem with text links is that most banner exchange programs and sites that sell advertising use banners. So to advertise on most sites you have to have a standard 468 x 60 pixel banner to use in your ad campaigns.
This poses a dilemma for advertisers but there is a simple solution: Make your banners look like text links!
The process of creating banners of this type is a very simple one, but there are several steps involved:
1. Create a regular text link in HTML. You can use any background color that you wish, but do keep in mind that a white back-ground will blend in with most web sites and your banner will appear more like a regular text link.
Now preview the link in your HTML editor or your web browser.
2. When the link looks exactly the way you want it to look, simply press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard. This copies the contents of the screen (including your text link) to the Windows clipboard.
3. Open up the Windows "Paint" program. You'll find it under "Accessories" on the "Start menu".
4. Click "Edit" and then click "Paste".
5. You'll now see the screen shot that you made with the "Print Screen" key. Save this as a JPEG image:
On the "File" menu, click "Save As". Type a name for the new image in the "File Name" box. In the "Save As Type" drop-down box, select JPEG. Now click "Save". You now a JPEG image of the screen shot that you took with the te xt link in it.
6. Open the image in your favorite photo editor (I use MGI PhotoSuite). Carefully crop the image around the text link until it measures exactly 468 x 60 pixels. If you need other banner sizes (buttons or skyscrapers for instance), simply crop your image to the size needed.
You now have a banner ad that looks like a text link! Use this for your ads and banner exchange campaigns and enjoy a much higher click-through-rate than you would receive with traditional banners!

How do I add my site to Google's search results?

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy; you don't even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.
To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, just perform a search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:www.google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.google.com+
Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

• The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
• The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
• The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

Our intent is to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. While there's no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.
Consider creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages. Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.