Link Building - Great Rankings by James V Eyk
Link popularity is a very important part for your search engine rankings.
The link popularity greatly influences the way that search engines rank your
website. Google for example has something called a Page rank which they assign
to each website and to each individual web page. The page rank in turn affects
the position that your website will rank in the search engine results for any
particular keyword or key phrase.
Link popularity is normally used as a term that describes the number of links
as well as the quality of links that lead to your website from quality websites
that relevant to your site content wise. Although Google has recently start
placing less importance on inbound links due to link farms and paid link
networks, inbound links are still considered to be of the upmost importance for
search engines when ranking a website and its link popularity.
The search engines view an inbound link as some form of testimonial which shows
that a specific website has some form of quality content worth linking to. In
recent times we have seen the strong growth of blogs and blog networks. Due to
the strong habit of bloggers to link to one and other, many blogs have been
able to reach very good rankings.
The webmasters of e-commerce sites quickly saw the trend and jumped on the band
wagon so as to increase their link popularity. Unfortunately due the large
number of webmasters and marketers having abused blogs by link spamming them,
the search engines are now frequently skeptical when it comes to inbound links
from blogs.
For those of you that are new to the Page rank system, the easiest way to check
the page rank for any website is by downloading the Google toolbar for either
Internet Explorer or for Firefox. After installing either one, you will be able
to see a small box in your browser which indicates the Google Page rank for any
website that you visit.
Step 1 - Finding relevant and highly ranked websites
The best way for raising your link popularity is by getting an inbound link
from a website which is ranked well and has content that is relevant to your
website or that complements it somehow. I advice all my readers to stay well
clear from link exchanges, networks and link farms. History shows us that the
search engines find out about this in the end (especially Google) and this can
lead to dramatic actions from their side. The punishment can include even
deletion of your website from their search engine and will ruin your link
popularity.
Once your website is banned from one of the major search engines it can be a
very long process to get re-included. It does happen frequently that a website
is not allowed to be re-included in the search engine which is a nightmare for
any website as it seriously reduces the potential traffic volume that a website
could attract.
This might be a good time to warn you about shady search engine optimization
firms with a bulk of them coming from India. These search engine optimization
firms promise top 10 Google and Yahoo rankings and lots of other promises which
seem to be good to be true. These firms often use black hat SEO tricks to
increase the ranking of their client's websites. The problem is that they will
not give you the top 10 ranking most likely and secondly once the search engine
finds out, you will be more than likely deleted from the search engine results.
Frequently if you ask these firms about this they will tell you that everything
they do is completely legal and that they will do miracles for your link
popularity.
Those words won't help you very much though once they have done their damage
and managed to get you delisted from the search engines. You won't hear back
from them once that occurs and all your efforts in regards to link popularity
will have been a waste of time.
Just work on your link popularity yourself and start slowly. Search for sites
which clearly are sites with similar content and high page rank or look for
sites that are affiliated with government websites or educational websites as
the search engines seem to hold those links in the highest regards.
2) Requesting an inbound link
Obviously the other site their webmaster needs to be made aware of your site so
that they can consider linking to your website.
The easiest way to do this and hopefully improve your link popularity is
through sending an email to the webmaster or website owner with a request for a
link.
It's very important to customize each email and for the email not look like a
generic email as people really hate that. You will find that the positive reply
percentage is much higher this way compared to some standard email which you
send out.
We have created a few tips for creating this link request email which should
lead to higher link popularity.
* Try obtaining the email address of the relevant person rather than sending it
to info@example.com as your email might end up in the spam or delete box.
* Be careful what you write in the email and the subject title as certain words
link exchange might trigger a spam filter or possibly takes away the interest
of the recipient to read the email.
* Be straight forward on what you are asking for from the other person and try
to list some positive reasons on why the link would be beneficial to both
parties.
* Try to include some personalized items in the email which shows that you have
read through their website and that you really are interested in dealing with
them. This will certainly lead to an increase in link popularity in the long
run.
* It's more than normal that you will be required to give a link back. If you
are the one initiating the contact then you should place a link on your site
which links to their site first. This will show a sign of trust and will most
likely lead to a backlink to your site.
If however they do not reply after some time you should remove the link to
their site as it will have no benefit to your link popularity efforts.
For the remainder of the tips and advice please visit the authors website where
the article continues.
The remaining section of the article can be found here:
Link Popularity
About the Author
James has been a long time member of the SEO and Search Engine Marketing
community and is a regular contributor to the free
marketing advice site: Explainsall.com
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