Improving the Link Popularity of Your Site
By Sumantra Roy
Link popularity, i.e. the number
of sites which are linking to your site, is an increasingly important
factor as far as search engine placement is concerned. Other things
remaining the same, more the number of links to your site, higher will
be its ranking.
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 link from a site which is related to yours is more
valuable than a link from an unrelated site.
In this article, I explore different
methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. I
start with a method that you shouldn't bother using, then go on to the
moderately effective methods, and then end with the most effective
methods you 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 that while FFA pages may not directly bring in
traffic to your site, it will help to improve the link popularity of
your site, and hence, will indirectly bring in traffic through the
search engines.
Nothing could be further from the
truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a
time. This means that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site
will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more and more people
submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed down, and
finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed.
Now, since you can bet that plenty of
other people are also submitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site
will remain in these pages for only a short span of time. Hence, in
order to ensure that the search engines see your site if and when they
come to spider the FFA page, you will need to ensure that you submit
your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis - at least once a week.
Even if you used an automatic
submission program to do it, can you imagine a worse way to spend your
time and/or money? Furthermore, many search engines recognize these
pages which only contains links to other sites as FFA pages and may
completely ignore them. And while I haven't yet seen any evidence that
submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is
every possibility that this might happen in the future.
Hence, when it comes to FFA pages, my
advice is simple: don't even think about them.
2) Starting an Awards Program
A moderately effective method of
improving the link popularity of your site is to start an awards
program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an
award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to
display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site,
preferably to a page which contains more information on the award. If
you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your
newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your
newsletter. This adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives
more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may
review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the
incentive to subscribe to your newsletter to see if they win the award.
Make sure that you give awards to only
those sites which deserve to 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 sure
that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it
doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in their sites.
3) Giving testimonials
This may sound a bit unusual, but
giving testimonials for products or services which you find useful can
be another moderately effective way of improving the link popularity of
your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and
tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you.
Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your
comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in
their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they
publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along
with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will
agree since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility
to the testimonial.
Of course, please don't go about giving
testimonials to every company you can locate just because it will
improve your link popularity :-)
4) Posting to Message Boards and
Discussion Lists
Another moderately effective method of
increasing the link popularity of your site is to post to online message
boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by
mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board
allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your
site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the individual
messages that are posted to 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 be dynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will
not be able to find your link.
Email based discussion lists which are
archived on the web in static HTML pages can also be used to boost the
link popularity of your site in a similar manner. In this case, the
signature file that you use with your email program should contain the
URL for your web site.
5) Starting a Link Contest
A good method of improving the link
popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if
they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be
something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to
link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you
publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away
some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners.
If you sell a software (or an ebook),
you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners,
since it doesn't cost you anything to produce an additional copy of
digital goods like software and ebooks.
Link contests work best if you run the
contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently.
If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, the
webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their links. However,
if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month
or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their links to
your site.
Also, make sure that you require all
participants to have a link to your site either in their home page, or
in an internal page of their site which is linked to their home page.
Also ensure that the page which contains the link is no more than two
levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than two
clicks to go from the home page to the page containing the link). If
they don't do this, the search engine spiders may not index 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 link popularity of your site, and one of my favorites.
Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish
it in my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as a
separate web page. I also submit it to the following article submission
sites:
Many webmasters and ezine publishers
frequent these article directories in search of articles. Submitting my
articles to these directories gives them the opportunity of
re-publishing my articles. While I have had some success with each of
the above directories, by far the best among them is the
ezinearticles.com directory. Now, at the end of each article, I mention
that people are free to re-publish the article as long as they include
my resource box (i.e. my bio) at the end of the article. I always
include the URL of my site in the resource box. This means that whenever
someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I have another
site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers archive their
ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my article in a
particular issue, I again get a link.
Writing articles is also an excellent
viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and ezine publishers publish my
articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers will read my article.
Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be read
by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom will publish
it... and so on.
Also, since only web sites related to
mine would be interested in publishing my articles, all these links tend
to come from related sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more
valuable than 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 in your field. This helps to improve your
credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your
products or services.
Some notes about writing articles:
i) I have learnt through experience
that some webmasters will publish other people's articles and will
display the complete resource box but will not link to the URL mentioned
in the resource box. In order to prevent this, you need to explicitly
state that the article can be published only if the URL mentioned in the
resource box is linked to your site.
ii) Your resource box should not be too
long - it should be no more than 6 lines long, formatted at 65
characters per line. Otherwise, other webmasters and ezine publishers
will hesitate to publish your article.
7) Submitting to the directories
This is by far the most important step
as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As I
mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to
your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are
as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!,
the Open Directory etc. However, Yahoo! currently requires a payment of
$299 per year in order to list any commercial site. Paying them $299 per
year just to improve your link popularity is probably not cost
effective. But, the Open Directory is free, and you should definitely
get your site listed in the Open Directory.
Also, you should submit your site to as
many of the smaller directories as possible. You can get a list of such
directories at
http://dir.yahoo.com/
8) Exchanging links with other
webmasters
The single-most effective way of
improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with
other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not
direct competitors. This is called reciprocal linking.
However, the problem with this method
is the sheer amount of time it takes if you were to do it manually.
If you decide to do this manually, you
can easily expect to spend 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 to yours that are not direct competitors by typing
in some keywords that 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 actually exchange links.
iv) If you decide that you want to
exchange links with a particular site, you need to find out exactly how
it wants you to link to it from your site.
v) You then need to manually add a link
to this site in your site.
vi) Then, you need to find out the
email address of the owner of the website and send the owner a
personalized email requesting that he/she adds a link to your site in
return.
vii) In many cases, you will not be
able to locate the email address of the owner simply because the owner
has not published any email address on the site. In that case, all the
effort that you had put into evaluating whether or not the site is
suitable for exchanging links will have been a waste of time.
viii) If you do manage to locate the
email address, you need to send a personalized and customized email to
the website owner.
ix) You then need to wait and see
whether this site is willing to exchange links with you.
x) If the site is not willing to link
to you, you need to remove the link to the site from your site. Once
again, all the effort that you had put into evaluating the site, linking
to it and sending an email to the owner will have been a waste of time.
You have to repeat the same process all
over again for the next site 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 software called LinkExplore that completely
automates the entire process of exchanging links with other website
owners, thus saving you hundreds of hours of your time.
I had originally developed the software
for my own needs but later decided to make it available to other website
owners as well.
Go to the following URL to learn more
about the software:
http://www.LinkExplore.com/
Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected search
engine positioning specialists on the Internet. To have Sumantra's
company place your site at the top of the search engines, go to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com.
For more advice on how you can take your web site to the top of the
search engines, subscribe to his FREE newsletter by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/newsletter.htm.
