Linking Strategies
Measuring Link Popularity
Which search engines use link popularity as a factor in ranking pages?" Well, that question has become pretty moot these days. Just about every spider based search engine uses link popularity as a factor. So, how do you find out how much link popularity your site has? And how do you know which sites are actually linking to you? In this article, I'll tell you how you can find out the link popularity of your site in some of the major search engines.
What Makes a Site Link-Worthy?
What is the motivation for one site owner to link to another site? The fundamental design of the web allows for any document to link to and to be linked from any other document. This is how the web's inventors intended it when the hypertext protocol was first developed long ago, before most of us had ever heard of the Internet.
Using Google to Identify High Quality Link Targets
Building links to your site improves rankings in certain search engines. Not all of the search engines put as much weight on inbound links, but one that does is Google. Google has become the 800 pound gorilla in the search engine wars, seemingly overnight.
The Five Major Flaws of Link Popularity
More links mean a site must have good content, right? And more links mean more site visitors, right? And surely more links mean better rankings in search engines, right? Wrong. None of the above is true. In some cases each could be true, but only if you delve a little deeper into the realities of linking in the online world. If a year ago search engine optimization was all the rage, nowadays it's link popularity, and this new kid in town is a mighty popular one.
Ten steps to building links to your site
It's the online equivalent of word-of-mouth advertising. And just like its offline cousin, it's the most effective way to get new business.
Does the following scenario sound familiar? You recently overhauled your web site, but the search engines still have numerous links to your old web pages. Many of the pages those links lead to are gone completely, and those that remain are no longer up-to-date. You need to know how you can remove these dead links from the search engines so that the engines have links to your new pages only.
Portal Links: Where They Are and How to Get Them
By now most of us have grown accustomed to spending the $199 it takes to get reviewers at a portal to take a look at our sites. Yahoo!, LookSmart, and NBCi/SNAP are requiring fees for the right to have our sites linked. Check that. For the right to have our sites looked at by editors. Even bot-only Inktomi wants you to pony up a few bucks in order to get spidered
Now Is The Time For A Portal Link Audit
For a web marketer trying to maximize links at the major portals, it's the best of times and the worst of times. Opportunities abound, but it's so confusing you avoid it.
Make Friends With Competing Search Engine Links
In your mind, you have a collection of terms and phrases that you feel are the most important for your site. In a perfect world, any time someone searches for those terms or phrases, your site's links would appear first in all search engine results.
Linking Mistakes To Avoid
Linking to other web sites has been part of the natural order of things on the web ever since the web began. Even so, it wasn't until about two years ago, when the search engines started factoring external links into their rankings, that people with web sites started getting serious about link building
Linkability - Why do some sites have it while others don't?
Linking from one web site to another and from one web page to another is the fundamental essence of why the Web was invented. In a nutshell, researchers needed a way to link between similar
Give People A Reason To Link!
Have you ever visited a web site and they ask you to link to their site...and that's it?! They give you no reason to link. I have to be honest, I won't link to a web site unless I get some kind of benefit. If you want people to link to your web site give them something in return. The following are some reasons I might link to another web site:
Email Links: The Good, the Bad, and the Gibberish
One of my favorite ways to help a new Web site attract users is to seek out email-based venues where the site is a topical match for that venue and where such an announcement is acceptable to post.
Easy Linking
As hard as some of us work to seek out and request links for our sites, we often overlook a simple yet effective way to encourage links: a detailed link-instructions page.
Automated Link Generators - Not Worth The Trouble
There are automated software programs that some web marketers use to try and generate links for their sites. Most work the same way. You do a search at a search engine for a certain term, and the software program will visit each site in the search results, combing the HTML looking for email addresses. Once found, these programs then send an email of your creation to every site it has found an address for and asks for a link.
A Technique For Selecting Sites For Link Requests
You know you should have more links pointing to your site, but you're not sure what the best approach is to pursue them. One of my favorite approaches is to use the search results for terms that are important for my site.
A Linking-Campaign Primer
The climate surrounding linking between sites has changed remarkably over the past couple of years. While it's still possible to secure high-quality inbound links to your site at no cost, the very task of overseeing an inbound-link campaign -- finding sites from which to link, and managing them -- is far more complex than it used to be.