PART 1
Search engines are the gateway to the Internet – in most cases they are the first tools that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. Without at least one backlink, you will not get listed in any search engine! This is true even if you’ve submitted your website on their “Add URL” pages (is not necessary, though… the search engine spiders will find your link automatically if it can be found on at least one popular domain). And the more links you are getting and the more often other websites are using your keywords when they do mention your website, the better you will rank for your keywords.
This is why link popularity is so imperative. If customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales…
You’re probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word – plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. Google uses the term “Pagerank” for this – the more backlinks you have for your site, the higher the “Google Pagerank” (between 1-10 with 10 being the most valuable PR).
So how do you make your link “popular”?
Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.
The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don’t get discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords even though it will take you longer than if you just take a step back and go for the less competetive phrases.
There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not give your site link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” – pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!
The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have
reservations about your visitors seeing (e.g. spammy websites with no real content). The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. This is what is called linking to a “bad neighbourhood”. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it (lose your pagerank).
So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and get top 10 rankings on all the major search engines:
1.) DIRECTORY SUBMISSIONS
One of the first things you should always do is to get listings in as many of the free web directories as possible. Personally, I think that a listing in Yahoo is too expensive with almost $300 per year for a business related site (which is the case when you want to make a profit off your site and who doesn’t want that?). There are a lot of other websites where you can get listed for a smaller fee or for free so I don’t bother getting listed there. Dmoz.org, the most important free web directory you can get into, gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed. It can take months…
You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of an appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships “Alpaca wool” from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.
When adding your link text into the form, make sure that you are using the keywords that you want to get your high search engine rankings for!
2.) RECIPROCAL LINKS
The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example.
Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects – and both of your sites’ link popularity. Look which sites WANT to exchange links. Obviously, sites with no link partner page are not interested in exchanging links.
Contact sites where you can find a links page and tell them that you’ve added their link to your site (you need to add their link first if you want them to consider linking back to you!) and if they want to reciprocate. Do not go over the top with this by sending out thousands of generic link requests. Only send requests to website owners of sites you have visited and considered great partners.
The best way to do this reciprocal linking is to go to Google and do a search for e.g. intitle:”add url” +inurl:”your keyword here”. What this does is that it checks for the title of the page and looks if it has the “Add URL” phrase there and the second part checks if your keyword appears in their URL. To stay with the above example, you would look for “wool” or “knitting”. Most sites which have “Add URL” in their title will gladly exchange links with you and probably have a reciprocal links manager script in place. This way, you’ll get listed on their links page automatically as soon as a backlink on your site is found.
Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find (spread over days and weeks, not hours…), bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. Too many backlinks in too little time will trigger a spam filter with most search engines. For example, it would not be normal for a site to start with 0 backlinks when it is spidered by the search engines and have 3500 backlinks 3 days later. Do not focus on reciprocal links alone but try to get more one way backlinks through the other methods mentioned in this article.
3.) SOCIAL BOOKMARKING AKA „TAGGING“
Social bookmarking websites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. In a similar way like you save your bookmarks in your web browser, you are able to save bookmarks on these special websites. You can “tag” your links meaning you can assign keywords to your posts and content in general.
Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format – feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries, etc. – can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of Social News Sites like Reddit.
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are either accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.
These sites are also meant when people are talking about this Web 2.0 thing.
Web 2.0 means websites for a community of people, social networks, and these people rate and tag content rather than a search engine or some automated solution ( Sites like Flickr.com and YouTube.com belong into that category as well). This way, the relevance of content gets determined by real people as opposed to having some search engine apply algorithms and get results which are not always suitable.
That’s why Digg.com claims:
“Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that’s important to you!”
Popular social bookmarking sites are e.g.:
technorati.com/ (it’s also a blog directory)
www.digg.com/
www.reddit.com/
and dozens of others. More and more sites like these come up on a daily basis and only the future will show which ones will get as popular as the ones mentioned above.
END OF PART 1
Monday the 19th
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