Tag Archives: listing
Improving Link Popularity (Page 1 of 2)
Search engines are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so important. If the customers can’t find your website, you won’t make sales.
You might be wondering, “What is popular about a link!” 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. So, how do I make my 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 recipe, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.
The more popular tour 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 the search engines. But don’t be discouraged; there are ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.
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 achieve 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 any problem about your visitors seeing. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.
So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve high link popularity and improve your rankings on all the popular search engines.
The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is 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.
You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company sells Goats Milk from a farm located in the middle of Whoop Whoop, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Goat Product” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.
Improving Link Popularity (Page 1 of 2)
Search engines are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so important. If the customers can’t find your website, you won’t make sales.
You might be wondering, “What is popular about a link!” 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. So, how do I make my 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 recipe, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.
The more popular tour 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 the search engines. But don’t be discouraged; there are ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.
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 achieve 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 any problem about your visitors seeing. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.
So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve high link popularity and improve your rankings on all the popular search engines.
The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is 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.
You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company sells Goats Milk from a farm located in the middle of Whoop Whoop, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Goat Product” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.
Using Link Bait To Attract Massive Free Traffic
Here is a technique I have long used to attract massive free traffic to some of my websites. Recently, more and more people are discussing this largely intuitive technique, and giving it a variety of names. The name I most embrace is “link bait.”
“Link bait” is anything that you put on your site that encourages others to link to your site, and then drive massive amounts of free traffic to your site by telling others about it. It’s some feature that by it’s very nature makes others reference your site and want to tell others about it.
Examples of this could be a service that they need to visit your site to access, or an outstanding article that they have to visit your site to read, or even some type of list that they need to visit your site to access.
Examples of link bait that I can think of (actual and hypothetical)… things that would cause other webmasters, publishers, and just people in general to send you traffic include:
– The site http://formatit.com/ has a software utility that formats emails for free. This is where I format all of my ezines and emails to a max of 65 characters per line 😉
– The site http://selfpromotion.com/ has a program that allows you to semi-automatically submit your sites to all of the major and minor search engines and directories for free.
– A site that has a listing of all the major blog directories.
– A site that has a listing of all the major places to “ping” when posting to your blog.
– A recipe conversion chart on a cooking site.
– A chart showing calories burned during various exercises.
– A listing (with hot links) and maybe reviews of major internet marketing forums.
– A list of 100 top rated directories to submit your ezine articles to.
– A list of the 100 most popular baby names.
– A list of foods considered aphrodisiacs… and why they work.
… you get the idea!
If you can incorporate something similar to the above on your blog or site, then after the word gets out, it will be natural for people to link to you. They’ll feel good linking to and telling others about your site. People enjoy appearing “in the know.”
You should do some brainstorming today, and see what ideas you can come up with for link bait to add to you site and then tell the world about.
As I said, it can even be an article. For example, an article on how to really optimize a website, 20 top traffic generation methods, some type of webmaster tricks, etc.
As an example, I recently wrote an article, which I expanded into an ebook called “20 Insider Techniques Of A Super Affiliate.” I recently decided to post these techniques as a 20-part series to my blog at http://WillieCrawford.com/blog/
Once people start referring to this series, it will attract traffic to my blog for a very long time. The key then is to have links in my blog’s navigation that make it easy to locate this series even months from now!
Go ahead… do some brainstorming, and then put some link bait on your site. Then tell a few others and ask them to help spread the word. After all, link bait only works if the word gets out. Once it does, the flow of traffic will become unstoppable.