One of the best ways to attract visitors to your web site, and to encourage them to return, is to show that you're committed to providing a quality service. One way to do this is to win some awards for your site. This is often thought of as a difficult and time consuming pastime, but it doesn't have to be.

Want to know if our advice works? Well we spent a few hours submitting our site for awards, and we've won quite a few. More importantly, we've generated extra traffic to our site, and increased our standings in some search engines.

The first step is to decide what type of awards you want to win from the thousands that are available. You can use a search engine like Lycos or Google to trawl through award sites, but the easiest way is to visit an awards directory like the excellent Award Sites. It lists more than 1,700 awards and rates them individually with information about their overall quality, criteria and rules.