Link Popularity

The first method search engines use to grade a Web site is how many Web sites point to them. Hence if your site has 100 other sites linking to you, but your competitor has only 10, your site will rank higher in some search engines. As a byproduct, every site that links to you is a potential entry point for your customers.

There are many options to getting linked, most of which are byproducts of other E-Marketing techniques discussed throughout this course. Some examples include business directory sites, Web awards, Internet top 50 sites, resource sites, banner sites, blind links, affiliate links, free Web sites and reciprocal links with other non-competing Web sites.

Once you are linked by any of these methods, it is advantageous to submit the sites that point to you to the search engines as many of them may not be indexed. This not only tells the search engines that they exist but also that they link to you.

There are plenty of sites that attempt to collect a complete listing of all businesses on the Internet. These come and go on a regular basis, but can be a useful tool to improve your popularity while they do exist. Your goal is to find as many of these sites as possible, get listed, then submit the listing page to the search engines.

These sites, often cheesy in nature, attempt to award the best of the best Web sites and give them an award for being a quality site. For each site at which you win an award, you will be linked from that site and thus can submit the link page to the search engine. Look for award sites that will give you an award with no review. Of course these awards carry no value, but you are looking for the link popularity, and the page you are listed on can be submitted to search engines to improve link popularity.

Most award sites are also attempting to improve their own link popularity. This means you might consider making your own awards in a subdirectory of your main site in hopes of attracting large numbers of people who want awards. When you hand out the awards, they in turn make a link back to you, which improves your link popularity.

At first glance, you might assume that Internet Top 50 Sites are the same as award sites, which some are. However, most are self-promoting sites where you can add your site to the list of sites without review. Then you get credit every time someone goes from their site to yours or vice versa. Your position in the list is not terribly important since you are mainly seeking link popularity. Even though they would prefer it, you will probably not add a link on your site to theirs since this would clutter your site.

Resource sites list Web sites by categories much like search directories, but on a much smaller scale. As long as the resource site has a category relative to your business, you can likely get listed. Again, once listed, submit the page that lists you to the search engines.

Blind links are links in a Web page that are not visible to the visitor, but visible to the search engines. It is possible to put these links in other pages that you create and point them all back to your main site. This can be accomplished by making very small 1x1 graphics that display the same color as the background of the page. Simply name the graphic(s) something meaningful like "webmastertraining.gif" and point the link to the corresponding Web site.

Place these links discreetly at the very bottom of the Web page. Be careful NOT to put width and height tags for these graphics because these graphics are very small, and search engines can detect this as spam since no one can usefully use 1x1 graphic links. By not defining the width and height, the search engine is not likely to know the graphic size.

Affiliate links are links to your site where the site containing the link to your site earns money either by people visiting your site or by producing sales. For example, WebmasterCertification.com has an affiliate program that pays 5% of all course sales that come from the affiliate site. As a byproduct, the affiliate sites are linked to you and can be submitted to search engines to improve your popularity.

The drawback to affiliate link programs is that they must be created and maintained.

Another option is to create free Web sites at places like www.angelfire.com and have a link to your site from them. The problem with this idea is that the page you are submitting is not likely to be a very useful page, thus you are improving your link popularity at the expense of submitting dead weight to the search engines.

So please, only use this option if you can come up with a meaningful use for the free Web site, otherwise do not use it. If you choose to make free pages that point to you, consider making them a list of resources you recommend and have your site listed as one of the resources. This adds value to both the free site and the sites listed. Of course you would not want to list your competition as resources on the free site.

Source: Webyoda