Improving the Link Popularity Of Your Site

Link popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking toyour site, is an increasingly important factor as far as searchengine placement is concerned. Other things remaining the same,more the number of links to your site, higher will be itsranking. 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 linkfrom a site which is related to yours is more valuable than alink from an unrelated site. In this article, I expl...

Link popularity, i.e. the number of sites which are linking toyour site, is an increasingly important factor as far as searchengine placement is concerned. Other things remaining the same,more the number of links to your site, higher will be itsranking.

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 linkfrom a site which is related to yours is more valuable than alink from an unrelated site.

In this article, I explore different methods by which you canimprove the link popularity of your site. I start with a methodthat you shouldn't bother using, then go on to the moderatelyeffective methods, and then end with the most effective methodsyou 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 thatwhile FFA pages may not directly bring in traffic to your site,it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, andhence, will indirectly bring in traffic through the searchengines.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most FFA pages cancontain only a certain number of links at a time. This meansthat when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will beplaced at the top of the page. However, as more and more peoplesubmit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pusheddown, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, itwill be removed.

Now, since you can bet that plenty of other people are alsosubmitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site will remainin these pages for only a short span of time. Hence, in order toensure that the search engines see your site if and when theycome to spider the FFA page, you will need to ensure that yousubmit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis - atleast once a week.

Even if you used an automatic submission program to do it, canyou imagine a worse way to spend your time and/or money?Furthermore, many search engines recognize these pages whichonly contains links to other sites as FFA pages and maycompletely ignore them. And while I haven't yet seen anyevidence that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalizeyour site, there is every possibility that this might happen inthe future.

Hence, when it comes to FFA pages, my advice is simple: don'teven think about them.

2) Starting an Awards Program

A moderately effective method of improving the link popularityof your site is to start an awards program. You can have websites which are related to yours apply for an award from yoursite. The sites which win the award get the chance to displaythe logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site,preferably to a page which contains more information on theaward.

If you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners inyour newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners'sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to yournewsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to applyfor your award, since you may review their sites in yournewsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe toyour newsletter to see if they win the award.

Make sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserveto 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 surethat the logo you design for the award looks professional. If itdoesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in theirsites.

3) Giving testimonials

This may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials forproducts or services which you find useful can be anothermoderately effective way of improving the link popularity ofyour site. If you really like a product, simply write to thecompany and tell them why you liked the product so much and howit has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back toyou to thank you for your comments and will ask you forpermission to display your comments in their web site. Tell thecompany that you have no problems if they publish your comments,but request them to add a link to your site along with thetestimonial. There is every possibility that the company willagree since publishing the URL of your web site gives morecredibility to the testimonial.

Of course, please don't go about giving testimonials to everycompany you can locate just because it will improve your linkpopularity :-)

4) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists

Another moderately effective method of increasing the linkpopularity of your site is to post to online message boards. Atthe end of every message that you post, you can sign off bymentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If themessage board allows it, you can even include a shortpromotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts.However, make sure that the individual messages that are postedto 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 bedynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will notbe able to find your link.

Email based discussion lists which are archived on the web instatic HTML pages can also be used to boost the link popularityof your site in a similar manner. In this case, the signaturefile that you use with your email program should contain the URLfor your web site.

5) Starting a Link Contest

A good method of improving the link popularity of your site isto give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. Theprizes that you give out should ideally be something which otherwebmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, butwhich do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish anewsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away somefree advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If yousell a software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy ofyour software or ebook to the winners, since it doesn't cost youanything to produce an additional copy of digital goods likesoftware and ebooks.

Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuousbasis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run thecontest for a few months, and then stop it, the webmasters whohad linked to you will all remove their links. However, if yourun it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners everymonth or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keeptheir links to your site.

Also, make sure that you require all participants to have a linkto your site either in their home page, or in an internal pageof their site which is linked to their home page. Also ensurethat the page which contains the link is no more than two levelsdeep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than twoclicks to go from the home page to the page containing thelink). If they don't do this, the search engine spiders may notindex 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 by far one of the best ways of improving the linkpopularity of your site, and one of my favorites. Whenever Iwrite an article on search engine placement, I first publish itin my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as aseparate web page. I also submit it to the following articlesubmission 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 articledirectories in search of articles. Submitting my articles tothese directories gives them the opportunity of re-publishing myarticles. While I have had some success with each of the abovedirectories, by far the best among them is the ezinearticles.comdirectory.

Now, at the end of each article, I mention that people are freeto re-publish the article as long as they include my resourcebox (i.e. my bio) at the end of the article. I always includethe URL of my site in the resource box. This means that wheneversomeone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I haveanother site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishersarchive their ezines in their web sites. If they havere-published my article in a particular issue, I again get alink.

Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. Assome webmasters and ezine publishers publish my articles, otherwebmasters and ezine publishers will read my article. Some ofthem, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be readby other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom willpublish it... and so on.

Also, since only web sites related to mine would be interestedin publishing my articles, all these links tend to come fromrelated sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more valuablethan 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 inyour field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makespeople more comfortable about buying your products or services.

Some notes about writing articles:

i) I have learnt through experience that some webmasters willpublish other people's articles and will display the completeresource box but will not link to the URL mentioned in theresource box. In order to prevent this, you need to explicitlystate that the article can be published only if the URLmentioned in the resource box is linked to your site.

ii) Your resource box should not be too long - it should be nomore than 6 lines long, formatted at 65 characters per line.Otherwise, other webmasters and ezine publishers will hesitateto publish your article.

7) Submitting to the directories

This is by far the most important step as far as improving thelink popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentionedbefore, what is important is not only the number of links toyour site, but also the quality of the links to your site. Nolinks are as important as links from some of the majordirectories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo!currently requires a payment of $299 per year in order to listany commercial site. Paying them $299 per year just to improveyour link popularity is probably not cost effective. But, theOpen Directory is free, and you should definitely get your sitelisted in the Open Directory.

Also, you should submit your site to as many of the smallerdirectories as possible. You can get a list of such directoriesat Search Engines and Directories

8) Exchanging links with other webmasters

The single-most effective way of improving the link popularityof your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who havesites which are related to yours, but are not directcompetitors. This is called reciprocal linking.

However, the problem with this method is the sheer amount oftime it takes if you were to do it manually.

If you decide to do this manually, you can easily expect tospend 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 toyours that are not direct competitors by typing in some keywordsthat 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 actuallyexchange links.

iv) If you decide that you want to exchange links with aparticular site, you need to find out exactly how it wants youto link to it from your site.

v) You then need to manually add a link to this site in yoursite.

vi) Then, you need to find out the email address of the owner ofthe website and send the owner a personalized email requestingthat he/she adds a link to your site in return.

vii) In many cases, you will not be able to locate the emailaddress of the owner simply because the owner has not publishedany email address on the site. In that case, all the effort thatyou had put into evaluating whether or not the site is suitablefor exchanging links will have been a waste of time.

viii) If you do manage to locate the email address, you need tosend a personalized and customized email to the website owner.

ix) You then need to wait and see whether this site is willingto exchange links with you.

x) If the site is not willing to link to you, you need to removethe link to the site from your site. Once again, all the effortthat you had put into evaluating the site, linking to it andsending an email to the owner will have been a waste of time.

You have to repeat the same process all over again for the nextsite 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 softwarecalled LinkExplore that completely automates the entire processof exchanging links with other website owners, thus saving youhundreds of hours of your time.

I had originally developed the software for my own needs butlater decided to make it available to other website owners aswell. Go to the following URL to learn more about the software:http://www.LinkExplore.com/t.php?4901

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