Search Engines Ranking - Articles
Improve
the Link Popularity of your site
By
Sumantra Roy
Link
popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking to your site, is an
increasingly important factor as far as search engine placement is
concerned. Other things remaining the same, more the number of links to your
site, higher will be its ranking.
What
is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the
types of sites which are linking to you. A link from a site which is related
to yours is more valuable than a link from an unrelated site.
In
this article, I explore different methods by which you can improve the link
popularity of your site. I start with a method that you shouldn't bother
using, then go on to the moderately effective methods, and then end with the
most effective methods you can use to boost the link popularity of your
site.
1)
Submitting your site to Free For All (FFA) pages
A
common misconception among many Internet marketers is that while FFA pages
may not directly bring in traffic to your site, it will help to improve the
link popularity of your site, and hence, will indirectly bring in traffic
through the search engines.
Nothing
could be further from the truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain
number of links at a time. This means that when you submit your site to a
FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more
and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed
down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be
removed.
Now,
since you can bet that plenty of other people are also submitting their
sites to the FFA pages, your site will remain in these pages for only a
short span of time. Hence, in order to ensure that the search engines see
your site if and when they come to spider the FFA page, you will need to
ensure that you submit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis - at
least once a week.
Even
if you used an automatic submission program to do it, can you imagine a
worse way to spend your time and/or money? Furthermore, many search engines
recognize these pages which only contains links to other sites as FFA pages
and may completely ignore them. And while I haven't yet seen any evidence
that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is
every possibility that this might happen in the future.
Hence,
when it comes to FFA pages, my advice is simple: don't even think about
them.
2)
Starting an Awards Program
A
moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is
to start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to
yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get
the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your
site, preferably to a page which contains more information on the award.
If you
publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You
can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your newsletter. This
adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives more webmasters the
incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your
newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe to your
newsletter to see if they win the award.
Make
sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserve to win. If you
give your award to sites which don't deserve it, your award will have little
credibility, which will, in turn, hurt the credibility of your company.
Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks
professional. If it doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in
their sites.
3)
Giving testimonials
This
may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials for products or services
which you find useful can be another moderately effective way of improving
the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write
to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it
has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you
for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments
in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they
publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along
with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will agree
since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility to the
testimonial.
Of
course, please don't go about giving testimonials to every company you can
locate just because it will improve your link popularity :-)
4)
Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists
Another
moderately effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site
is to post to online message boards. At the end of every message that you
post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site.
If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional
blurb about your site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the
individual messages that are posted to that message board are archived in
static HTML pages (i.e. the URLs for the individual messages should not
contain a "?"). Otherwise, the search engines will consider these
pages to be dynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will not
be able to find your link.
Email
based discussion lists which are archived on the web in static HTML pages
can also be used to boost the link popularity of your site in a similar
manner. In this case, the signature file that you use with your email
program should contain the URL for your web site.
5)
Starting a Link Contest
A good
method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes
to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should
ideally be something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to
want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if
you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away
some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell a
software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or
ebook to the winners, since it doesn't cost you anything to produce an
additional copy of digital goods like software and ebooks.
Link
contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you
declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and
then stop it, the webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their
links. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners
every month or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their
links to your site.
Also,
make sure that you require all participants to have a link to your site
either in their home page, or in an internal page of their site which is
linked to their home page. Also ensure that the page which contains the link
is no more than two levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not
take more than two clicks to go from the home page to the page containing
the link). If they don't do this, the search engine spiders may not index
the page which contains the link to your site, and hence, may not find your
link.
6)
Writing articles and allowing them to be re-published
This
is an excellent method of improving the link popularity of your site.
Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish it
in my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as a separate web
page. I also submit it to the following article submission sites:
http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml
http://certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
Many
webmasters and ezine publishers frequent these article directories in search
of articles. Submitting my articles to these directories gives them the
opportunity of re-publishing my articles. While I have had some success with
each of the above directories, by far the best among them is the
ezinearticles.com directory.
Now,
at the end of each article, I mention that people are free to re-publish the
article as long as they include my resource box (i.e. my bio) at the end of
the article. I always include the URL of my site in the resource box. This
means that whenever someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web
site, I have another site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers
archive their ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my
article in a particular issue, I again get a link.
Writing
articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and
ezine publishers publish my articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers
will read my article. Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which
will again be read by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom
will publish it... and so on.
Also,
since only web sites related to mine would be interested in publishing my
articles, all these links tend to come from related sites, which, as I
mentioned earlier, are more valuable than links from unrelated sites.
Writing
articles, of course, has another very important benefit - if you write good
articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to
improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying
your products or services.
Some
notes about writing articles:
i) I
have learnt through experience that some webmasters will publish other
people's articles and will display the complete resource box but will not
link to the URL mentioned in the resource box. In order to prevent this, you
need to explicitly state that the article can be published only if the URL
mentioned in the resource box is linked to your site.
ii)
Your resource box should not be too long - it should be no more than 6 lines
long, formatted at 65 characters per line. Otherwise, other webmasters and
ezine publishers will hesitate to publish your article.
7)
Submitting to the directories
This
is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of
your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only
the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your
site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories
like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo! currently requires a
payment of $299 per year in order to list any commercial site. Paying them
$299 per year just to improve your link popularity is probably not cost
effective. But, the Open Directory is free, and you should definitely get
your site listed in the Open Directory.
Also,
you should submit your site to as many of the smaller directories as
possible. You can get a list of such directories
here.
8)
Exchanging links with other webmasters
The
single-most effective way of improving the link popularity of your site is
to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to
yours, but are not direct competitors. This is called reciprocal linking.
However,
the problem with this method is the sheer amount of time it takes if you
were to do it manually.
If you
decide to do this manually, you can easily expect to spend hundreds of hours
on this activity alone.
Here's
what you need to do:
i) You
need to use the search engines to find sites related to yours that are not
direct competitors by typing in some keywords that are related to your site.
ii)
You also need to find sites that link to your competitors.
iii)
You need to visit these sites and see if they actually exchange links.
iv) If
you decide that you want to exchange links with a particular site, you need
to find out exactly how it wants you to link to it from your site.
v) You
then need to manually add a link to this site in your site.
vi)
Then, you need to find out the email address of the owner of the website and
send the owner a personalized email requesting that he/she adds a link to
your site in return.
vii)
In many cases, you will not be able to locate the email address of the owner
simply because the owner has not published any email address on the site. In
that case, all the effort that you had put into evaluating whether or not
the site is suitable for exchanging links will have been a waste of time.
viii)
If you do manage to locate the email address, you need to send a
personalized and customized email to the website owner.
ix)
You then need to wait and see whether this site is willing to exchange links
with you.
x) If
the site is not willing to link to you, you need to remove the link to the
site from your site. Once again, all the effort that you had put into
evaluating the site, linking to it and sending an email to the owner will
have been a waste of time.
You
have to repeat the same process all over again for the next site that you
want to exchange links with.
Obviously,
there has to be a better way. And there is!
Luckily
for you, I have developed a ground-breaking new software called LinkExplore
that completely automates the entire process of exchanging links with other
website owners, thus saving you hundreds of hours of your time.
I had
originally developed the software for my own needs but later decided to make
it available to other website owners as well.
Click
here to learn more about the software.
This article may
be re-published as long as the following resource box is included at the end
of the article and as long as you link to the email address and the URL
mentioned in the resource box:
Article
by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search
engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search
engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending
a blank email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com
or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net