Getting The Big Picture Series: Part 6-"The Free-Way" #2

Is your business suffering? Can't seem to get noticed by the search engines?

You might want to work on your Link Popularity. If you've ever taken the time out to analyze other top ranking pages you would have noticed that they tend to have lots of important content and also links to other related "content rich" websites. Which means when a person visits your site they will be able to find what they are looking for either from you or the sites that you exchange links with.


Some major search engines including Alta Vista and Inktomi are now beginning to take notice of Google's success and are starting to use a similar system. They to are begining to give high ranks based on the popular links pointing back to a sight, along with the text found.

Two popular directories that can give your business a boost would be ODP the Open Directory Project and Yahoo. So do what you can to be listed here.

http://dmoz.org/
http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

To build your link popularity you need to:

1. have a constant flow of fresh content on your website

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/article_announce
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/publisher_network
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/netwrite-publish-announce

2. you need to sign up with sites that offer to exchange links (reciprocal linking)

http://www.webring.com
http://www.ringsurf.com

3. start writing your own content

FFA's or Free For All Link Pages along with link-share programs such as LinksToYou have no weight in search engine ranking therefore stay away because in the case of link-share programs your site could be black listed as a spammer or worst your site can be banned.

Why is that? With link-share programs what you have is one website that can wind up with millions of duplicate websites that all have exactly the same information and links on them and most of the time a lot links with information not related to your website and the search engines are looking for fresh relevant content.

To check your link popularity, you can either visit the engines and check it from there, or you can use this free link popularity checker. It currently supports MSN, Lycos/FAST and Altavista.

Getting The Big Picture?

Reference
http://www.seo-guide.com/link_popularity.html