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Why link popularity is important
The Importance of Links
All of the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN now use link
popularity and link anchor text as the most important factors in determining their
rankings.
- Submit your site to directories like DMOZ. There are hundreds of directories that
will give you decent PageRank and some traffic. I especially recommend it for brand
new sites that usually have less success exchanging links (see point 2). Our sister
site has numerous list of the best free & paid
directories.
- Increase the number of external links coming into your site by starting a link
exchange program.
- Ask sites that link to your competitors to link to your site. To find
out which sites are linking to your competitors, visit a search engine
and enter, "link:" followed
by your competitors' domain name.
Example: link:www.web-directories.ws
- Find sites that accept site submissions.
Visit your favorite search engine and do a search for: : "add url" "your
keywords"
- Add content that will attract sites to link to you. This is a harder one, but it
will pay off big time in the long run. Think of it as getting free advertising.
- Within your web site, ensure that you link your internal web pages to each other.
Add a Site Map. Ensure that you have links to your most important pages on every
page of your site. This will maximize the PageRank to your important pages.
- Paid advertising is another method to gain links. If possible, you should purchase
links from sites with a similar these as yours. For example, if you are a travel
site then other travel sites would be the most valuable links.
Patience Required
Be patient. It is believed that there is an aging factor on new links
in some search engines and that new links do not provide their full benefit for a
number of months.
There is also evidence that links from older established sites are more valuable than
links from newer sites. To make things even more complicated, search engines, especially
Google, give more weight to trusted, authority sites. Government and education sites
are a couple of examples.
Are all links created equally?
No. The search engines are striving to give more credit to links that are from related
sites (sites with the same topic).
Is it possible to have too many links?
As a matter of fact, it is. Google tracts the history of links and may penalize a site
that gains too many links in a short period of time. They are looking for patterns that
are beyond the norm for a site to gain links. |
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