101 CSS Galleries for Backlinks and Traffic
When I checked my February stats I noticed a spike of traffic had come in from a site called Design Shack. A little investigation revealed that this is a CSS Gallery and prompted me to investigate if there were any others out there. There are! Lots of them… and they are a great source of traffic and one-way backlinks to your site.
What is a CSS Gallery?
Ok first up, what is CSS? (Skip to the next paragraph if you already know this.) CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet and is the industry standard way of styling websites. If you use WordPress, every theme will have a style sheet built into it. The styling controls the look and feel of the design – the colours, the fonts, layout, spacing and so on.
A CSS Gallery (they are also known as CSS directories) is a website that showcases websites that demonstrate good design. They are a great source of inspiration if you are a web designer looking for ideas. As I discovered, they also happen to be a nice source of traffic if your site happens to get featured on one of them…
You Need a Unique Site Design
Before I go any further I need to just point out that this strategy will only work for you if your site design is unique. This means that if you are using one of the many free WordPress themes you cannot submit that. However, if you have spent money on having a theme custom designed for you then this strategy could get you some bonus traffic to soften the blow a little.
These CSS Galleries typically have various categories so you can submit any kind of site – it does not have to be a blog. As long as the design used on your site can’t also be found on a bunch of others it will be fine to submit to most of these galleries.
Traffic & Backlinks
I picked up on this idea because of the traffic that the listing on the CSS Gallery mentioned above sent me. Looking at the stats it would seem that the majority of the traffic came in a rush at the beginning when the site was first listed. I imagine that most of these sites list new submissions on the front page and it would be those that get the most traffic.
Let’s not forget though that each of these is providing you a one-way backlink and the vast majority of them are do-follow. Having backlinks to your site gives it authority over time which can help it rank better in the search engines. However, unless your site happens to be about CSS or web design in some way you’ll find that these particular links are not highly relevant to your niche so they won’t be quite as good as say a deep link from a fellow blogger.
Let me go back to the traffic benefit for one moment… I noticed that several of the CSS Galleries that I have been looking at also have blogs and all the latest designs get pushed to the RSS feed. Some of them have thousands of readers so getting featured could bring a nice influx of traffic.
CSS Gallery / Directory List
I have spent a few hours trawling the Internet to find as many of these sites as I can and I managed to find 101! I’ve also noted down the Google PageRank and Alexa ranking but remember that is only valid at the time of posting and if you’re reading this some time after I posted it those stats may be out of date.
Here is the list:
Tips for Submission
Don’t submit to all of the galleries in one sitting. That might be a few too many backlinks in one go for Google and it will probably make your eyes bleed anyway. Note that not all of the galleries listed accept all sites. For example I saw one that specialised in horizontally scrolling web designs so take a moment to look around the site and check that your design is suitable.
I plan to submit my blog to as many as these as I feel is appropriate / can be bothered with. I’ll do this gradually over the remainder of the month so it will be interesting to see if any of them pop up in my March stats.
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Mike Huang
March 14, 2008
WOW! This is quite something Caroline :) I had no idea these things mattered to sites online lol. Thanks for searching and making such a huge list. I think it’s time for me to go about :)
-Mike
Mike Huang’s last blog post..Are You A Sniper Blogger Or A Gattling Gun Blogger?