The Web Server Makes It Public

The Web server is a software application that exposes a Web site for others to see. You can't have a Web site without a Web server, because the server is what a browser communicates with in order to fetch Web pages. Without the server, your Web site is just a bunch of files sitting in your computer that only you can access.
Unlike a Web site, a Web server is complicated to set up and (especially) to maintain. In fact, there are all kinds of reasons not to run the Web server software yourself, even if you're technically inclined. I'll get to that later, but consider this: If I don't run a Web server, why should you? Let someone else run the Web server for you on their own computer. This is called Web hosting and it'll get your site up and running a lot faster than setting up your own Web server.
Web Server Confusion
Sometimes Web server refers to the physical computer that the Web server software runs on, as opposed to the software itself. To avoid this confusion, I always say Web server to refer to the software and server computer to refer to the computer on which the Web server runs.

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Finding Sites to Make a Link Request

To find sites that are appropriate for an inbound link request, you should:
Consider the sites you find useful, entertaining, and informative
Use the web taxonomic directories to find sites in your category and in related categories (See "Working with Directories," earlier in this chapter)
Use specialized searching syntax to find the universe of sites that search engines such as Google regard as "related" to yours
If you've looked carefully at Google search results, you may have noticed a Similar pages link
The Similar Pages link is supposed to show you more pages like the one the link modifies. How well it works varies widely (it works better on popular, highly ranked pages and less well on obscure pages). But it can give you some leads.
You can bypass the process of clicking Similar Pages by using the Google related: operator followed by a web page directly in a Google search. For example, entering the following Google search:
related:www.bearhome.com

is comparable to clicking the Similar Pages link for www.bearhome.com (and shows exactly the same web pages as the search result).
If you find it easier to analyze data presented visually, a demonstration tool called Google Visual Search, provided free by Anacubis, may be right for you. Anacubis's Google Visual Search Tool , http://www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google, uses the Google Web APIs to (among other things) present a visual representation of the sites similar to yours. For example, Figure 2-9 shows a visual representation of sites that are similar to http://www.mechanista.com, a site about antique typewriters, calculators, and other mechanisms

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