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Increasing Link Popularity
Search engine link popularity is measured by counting up how many other websites link to your website. Each website that links to yours counts as a vote for your website. Search engines give higher status and ranking to links coming in to your web pages from related, quality websites. They penalize links coming in to your website from "bad neighborhoods" such as link farms and banned websites. A link farm is a a website that contains line after line of indiscriminate links. Google was the first to use link popularity as a part of their web site positioning method and many search engines have adopted this method either by changing their methods or because they rely on Google to add to their own search engine results. It is very important to understand that search engine popularity is not real popularity. It is just one of the ways that a search engine decides how to sort search results. The only measure of real popularity is how many visitors arrive at your website no matter where they came from. Visitors who like your site will bookmark it, tell their friends, save your link to their desktop, and remember your domain name. Search engines cannot track any of this activity and so they don't really measure your actual popularity. Links from Popular Directories Start building your link popularity with a listing in a popular directory. The largest and most popular directories are currently dmoz, which is the Open Directory Project and Yahoo. The Open Directory Project is a free website directory, but it takes time to be added to the directory and their guidelines are very strict. Before you submit your site to dmoz, read their instructions very carefully and make sure that your website is in compliance. The Yahoo directory has a paid submission option which speeds up their process. It is money well spent. Yahoo is one of the 800 pound gorillas that can give you a boost in your link popularity. The key to effective listings in these two directories is choosing a category that is as specific as possible with the most effective geographic coverage. As an example, if you sell musical jewelry boxes on your website, try to find that specific category at a national level. If you are a local retailer, try to find that same category with a geographical zone within 25 to 50 miles of your location. dmoz.org Yahoo Directory Submissions Yahoo Search Submit Basic Yahoo Search Submit Pro Finding Sites to Link to Yours The next step is to work on locating other quality sites that are related to your own in some way. Doing this can help give you a boost in link popularity and new visitors from those sites. Don't overlook your competitor's websites. Many websites have adopted a policy of linking to sites that are good for their customers even though they are competitive sites. Their idea is that even if the customers don't find what they want on their own website, they will appreciate that the website helped them to find what they were really looking for. You can find these websites by using the search engines. Type in the keywords for your website and visit the sites that come up on the first few pages of the search results. Visit the webistes, check their quality, and see what sites link to them. In the Google search engine, you can type use the "link" filter to find out who links to them. Type "link:" followed by their domain name to produce the list of sites that link to them. You might find that some of the sites you find have paid submission options. These can be quite worthwhile if the site is of good quality and is highly ranked. You can also use this tool to find directories to submit to. Simply enter your keyword or keyword phrase and press submit. Many of the websites you find will require a reciprocal link from your site. What this means is that you place a link to their site on your web site and they place a link on their web site to yours. Many web sites have an automated reciprocal link system in place. You place a link to their website on your own, then you return to their site and fill out their form to add your own link. The form will ask you to fill the the page address on which you have listed your site. After you submit your application, their system automatically checks to see if your link to their site is live. If it is, your site is automatically added to their links page or directory. Other sites manage this by hand, usually with a submission form. Sometimes they want you to send an email to them. Make sure you read their instructions on how best to submit to them and what they are looking for. Some sites have a link page but no submission instructions or options. In this case, you will have to find their email address and request a link to your site. There are several things you can do to improve your chances of being added to another website's directory of links:
Set up a schedule for yourself to go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and relevance. Sometimes you will have to follow up on a site that doesn't respond. Wait and see if they add a link or respond. If they don't after about a month, send another email. Three emails should be your limit. If they don't respond by then, they are probably never going to. Link Exchanges There are a number of link exchanges that you can sign up with. These sites maintain lists of categorized sites that are actively seeking reciprocal links. Here are a few of them: ReciprocalLinkExchange.com LinkExchanged.com MonsterLinkSwap.com Linkalizer.com Automatic Link Exchanges There are a number of sites that offer automatic link exchanges. They manage every aspect of your reciprocal links by adding your site to a link directory that they maintain on their website. This will not help your site popularity as the links are not on your website and the links from the other websites do not link to your website. Some of these services are penalized by search engines, but not all of them are. We have been testing this on Google. We set up a link exchange with LinksMaster to see what would happen. Google has indexed all of our outgoing links and about half of the incoming links (1,890) What remains to be seen is if they'll index the rest and if that will have any effect on link popularity. If you'd like to take a look at our test directory, here's the page: Smart Web Center Link Directory Article Directories You can boost your sites ranking and popularity by writing articles and publishing them in article directories. When you publish on an article directory, you add a short bio to the end of the article with a link to your website so you immediately have a one-way link to your website from the article directory. Additionally, other website owners come to the article directory to find material to publish on their own websites. To use your article, they have to leave your bio intact. When they use your article on their own website, you gain another link to your website. A word of caution: do not publish the same article on your own website. Make sure your website has different articles and content so visitors are not disappointed by finding the same content as they just read on the article directory. Press Releases Press releases work well if you have anything newsworthy. Interesting data, new features on your site, a site launch, or other interesting news can be worthy of a press release. PRWeb.com is a good service to use to send out a press release. They publish your release and it gets picked up by other sites. If you have a really newsworthy press release and a it of luck, an actual publication in your topic may pick up the story and post it on their site or even in their print magazine. Make sure you include your website address in your press release. Blog Comments Check to see if there are any blogs that are relevant to your website. If so, visit these blogs and make comments on their posts. Make comments that are valuable. Do not just drop comments to get a link to your site. No one appreciates that and even though you will get a link to your site, you will not get visitors. As well, the blog owner may just delete your comment as blog spam. Most of the time you can your site link with your name when you’re leaving comments. The more popular blogs can result in quite a bit of traffic to your site and help tremendously with your site's link popularity. Forum Posts Check for forums that are relevant to your site and participate. Don't just go there to drop a link. Participate in a valuable way. Almost every forum allows you to add a signature line that contains a link to your website. This can result in traffic to your site, and a little bit of link popularity. Final Comments on Link Popularity These are just a few ways that you can increase your websites link popularity. There are many more but these are basics that will get you off to a good start. Unless you hire someone full time to work on your links, it is going to take time to build up your link popularity. There is no way around it, so just schedule it as an ongoing activity and build it up over time. You should be building links regardless of your standings in the search engines. Long before your site achieves a high link popularity on the search engines , it will become more visible and better connected on the web. This is good promotion for you. As you build up your links, websites you never contacted will find your site through your linking efforts and will add your link to theirs just because they think you have a good website. Many of them won't even tell you that they have added a link to your site. That's true link popularity and that's what you are working towards. Keep in mind: the more links you have out on the web, the more visitors to your site. Don't forget why you are building links. For visitors. If your visitors like your website, they will bookmark it, save the link to their desktop and tell others about it. Now you have returning visitors, which is the sign of real popularity. Don't get caught up in the artificial link popularity of the search engines! One last piece of advice: make sure that your site is complete, well designed and contains valuable content before you head off seeking links to your website. You need to make a good impression! p.s. If you would like to learn more about how to get quality links to your website, download this free eBook from Axandra.com. Just right-click on the link below and select save as. You will need winzip to unzip the eBook. How To Get High Quality Inbound Links |