Link Popularity
Your key to high search engine ranking
It seems like more and more search engines are
using link popularity as a part of their ranking process. Google
certainly follows this method and uses it as its most important
factor for ranking sites. Other big search engines like
Altavista, Hotbot, MSN, Lycos, Northern Light, Inktomi, Excite
are following by using link popularity as part of their their
ranking algorithms.
What is Link Popularity?
Literally speaking, link popularity means the
number of sites linking to your site. However, this does not
mean that you should aim at getting thousands of sites linking
to yours. However, if you are aiming to get a high ranking in
the search engines, you need to know that the quality of links
is more important that the quantity of links. If your site is
linked to many popular sites then you are sure to get a higher
ranking than if it is linked to hundreds of unpopular sites. The
idea behind link popularity is that other sites will link to you
only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So,
if many sites link to you it follows that you are a popular site
and therefore deserve a high ranking.
Look at link popularity as a way of getting more
traffic to your site. So, by getting other sites linking to you,
you are not only ranked higher in the search engines, you also
have a large volume of targeted traffic coming to your site.
With the competition increasing daily, getting a
good ranking in the search engines is of utmost importance. If
you really want a high ranking with the search engines, you need
to follow a focussed linking strategy.
Let's look at some of the linking strategies you
can adopt:
-
Writing articles on
your area of expertise
Writing quality articles is a sure way of attracting visitors
to your site. What could be easier than writing what you know
about? So write a great article, find sites that are related
to your area of service and submit your article to all those
sites. If it's a quality article it's a sure bet. For e.g. we
offer free
website design and
promotion tutorials on our site.
-
Reciprocal Links
Asking webmasters of other sites
to link to you is a good way of getting links to your site.
Politely ask the webmaster (preferably using their name) to
add your link to their site. You could tell them that you have
added their link to your site, give them a brief description
of what your site is about and how it will fit into their
site. If you have a good site most probably other sites will
want to link to you.
Tip: A great way to find
people who may be willing to link to you is to check your
competition's link popularity through a search engine. You can
do this by typing: link:/www.yoursite.com or through an online
tool such as linkpopularity.com.
Other link popularity strategies involve
submitting to FFA'a or Free For All page and submitting to all
the major and minor directories.
Finally, every week or so, make a list of the new
sites which you know have linked to you over the past week.
Also, have a look at your
site statistics and find out the new sites from which you
have received traffic. Submit each of these pages to the search
engines. This ensures that the search engines have spidered the
pages which are linked to you.
|