How link popularity can help your WEB sites

A high percentage of №1 ranked Web pages on Google don't contain the queried search term in the body text or in the META tags. How can that be? The answer is: These top ranked Web pages have high link popularity and a good PageRank(tm).

In our new series we're going to tell you how to obtain high link popularity and a good PageRank so that your Web pages get a high ranking on Google and other popular search engines.

Part 1: What exactly is link popularity?

Link popularity refers to the total number of links that a search engine has found for your Web page. The more Web sites link to your Web page, the higher the link popularity of your page. High link popularity contributes to a high search engine ranking.

Note that link popularity is measured only for single Web pages, not for the whole Web site. Your Web site can have several Web pages with different PageRank numbers.

The idea behind the link popularity concept is simple. The more other Web sites link to your Web site, the more important your site must be. Other sites wouldn't link to your site if there wasn't something interesting on your site or if your Web site didn't contain any special content.

It's nearly impossible to manipulate link popularity. Previous ranking algorithms that took META keywords or similar factors into account have been quickly abused to mislead the search engines. On the other side, it's very difficult to manipulate the number of links that point to a site.

That's why link popularity is now one of the most important factors for search engines when they rank a Web page.

However, you cannot get high link popularity by submitting your Web site to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Not all links are considered equal by the search engines. It does matter who links to you and how they link to you.

Part 2: Not all links are considered equal

As mentioned in the last issue of our newsletter, the more Web sites link to your Web site, the higher your link popularity.

However, not all links are equal. Some links count more than others. Links from important Web sites have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.

A link from www.AOL.com to your Web site has more weight than a link from a small private Web page. A link from a Web site with high link popularity is better than a link from an unknown Web site.

It's also important that the Web site that's linking to you has a similar topic as your Web site. Imagine that you sell books on your Web site. A link from another Web site that is all about books will count much more than a link from a Web site that links to all kind of Web sites.

Finally, it's important how the link to your site looks like. For example, one of your important keywords might be "all books about dogs".

The link

href="http://www.domain.com">all books about dogs

leads to much better search engine rankings for the keyword "books" than the following link

href="http://www.domain.com">DVD shop>

By the way, many people think that they can increase their link popularity by submitting their Web site address to FFA (free for all) link pages and link farms (Web sites that link to all kind of Web sites). This doesn't work.

More and more search engines recognize FFA pages and link farms and choose to ignore these pages. Usually, submissions to FFA pages are a waste of time that only results in many spam email messages.

In addition, you should avoid services that promise you 1000 links to your site within a week or so. If they link to you at all, these 1000 links must be of poor quality or they don't have a similar topic as your Web site.

Use common sense. Offers that sound too good to be true probably aren't true.

Summary all:

• try to get links from important Web sites
• try to get link texts that contain your important keywords
• don't use FFA or link farm pages
• don't use services that promise lots of links within days
• focus on quality links, not on quantity

Part 3: How to find good potential link partners

As explained in the last issues of our newsletter, it's important _who_ links to your site. Web sites that have a similar topic as your site are more important than Web sites with different topics.

In addition, if you can convince Web sites with a similar topic to link to your site, you'll also get targeted traffic from these sites.

People who visit your topic partner sites are usually interested in what you have to offer. They are more likely to come to your site and to buy something. It's the quality of the traffic that counts, not the quantity.

Part 4: How to contact potential link partners

In part 3, we told you how to find good potential link partners. When you've found such high quality sites, it's important that you use the right words to contact the webmasters of these sites.

If you want them to link to your Web site, you have to be personal and politely. Emails like the following usually do NOT work:

---snip---
Subject: Let's trade links

Hi!

I've found your site and I think we could link to each
other. That will increase your search engine ranking and
mine, too.

Best,

Alexander
---snip---

Many webmasters consider sending such messages as spamming. It's much more effective to use personalized email messages. They'll improve the chances of your link request message being read and acted upon favorably.

If you want positive feedback, you must convince the webmaster that you've really visited the Web site and that you know what the site is about.

Try to convince them that your Web site is related to their site and make it easy for potential link partners to link back to your site.

Here's an example:

---snip---
Subject: stakh.com and koobik.com

Alex,

I found your koobik.com site recently and
like it very much. I think the straight-to-the-point web
site design is perfect for the freeware tool you're
offering.

I've placed a link to your site at
http://www.stakh.com/recommended-sites

I've noticed that you link to other Web sites that are
related to your freeware tool.

It'd be great if you also placed a link to our Web site. If
you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me
by email or phone at 123-456-789.

Best regards,

Alexander Stakh, Stakh SEO NEWs

http://www.Stakh.com

PS. Visit "http://www.stakh.com/link-to-me.htm" for ready
made HTML code.
---snip---

As you can see, we've already linked to the other site before asking them for a reciprocal link. If you've already linked to a site, the webmaster is much more likely to answer your request.

Part 5: How to increase the success of your campaign

Until now, you've learned how to locate good potential link partners. In addition, you know which Web sites and services you should avoid if you want to obtain a good and long lasting link popularity.

You've also learned how to contact potential link partner sites and that a personal approach gets much better results than mass emailing sites.

Here are a few other important tips to increase the success of your linking campaign:

1. Link to potential link partners first before you ask them to link to you.

   Tell potential link partners that you've linked to their site and tell them where they can find the link on your site. If you link to other Web sites first, more webmasters are willing to add a link back to your site.
   
   

2. Offer a "Link to us" page on your Web site.

   Make it easy for other people to link to your site. Offer a "Link to us" page on your site that contains sample HTML code that your link partners can copy and paste into their own Web sites. The easier it is for your link partners to link to your site, the more likely they're going to link to you.
   
   http://www.stakh.com/link-to-us.htm
   
   On this Web page, there are three ready made HTML snippets at the end of the page that link partners can insert on their own link pages.
   
   With the snippets at hand, your link partners don't have to think about how to link to your site. A "Link to us" page also indicates that you're willing to exchange links. That means that other webmasters will approach you through that page.
   
   

3. Make your link pages easy to find.

   Don't be surprised that no one wants to link to you if your link back to their site is hidden somewhere in your site and cannot be found by the average Web surfer.
   
   Make it easy for your visitors to find your links page. If you're afraid of losing visitors, you can open the links to other Web sites in a new window.
   
   

Conclusion

Building a good link popularity requires some work but the results will pay for it. Link popularity is already the most important factor for search engines to rank Web sites.

The sooner you start with your linking campaign, the better the results for your business.

Copyright © 2003 Stakh SEO News ST-K

First 6 common mistakes of the webmaster's

This article lists all 6 parts of our "6 common mistakes that prevent your

This article lists all 6 parts of our "6 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines" series in a single article.

First 6 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from showing up on search engines

Many webmasters have the problem that their Web site is not listed in search engines at all. There can be a variety of reasons that your Web site doesn't show up on search engines.

 

Reason №1: You are using frames.

Many search engines have problems with frames. They often only index the frameset page and not the individual frames that contain the actual content. Unfortunately, the frameset page usually doesn't have META tags, title and enough content (text) to obtain a listing on a search engine.

The best solution to this problem would be to avoid frames. Usability guru counts frames as one of the top ten mistakes in Web design:

If you really must use frames, consider the following points:

1. Add a description of your Web site in the <noframes> area so that search engines can index that text. There you should also add a link to the homepage.

2. When a search engine indexes a frame page outside of the frameset, the visitor can be left stranded and unable to link into your site. So your individual frame pages should always contain a link back into your site.

3. Add some JavaScript to force frame pages into the frameset. This prevents visitors from inadvertently accessing an orphaned Web page. You can use the following JavaScript snippet:

---
if (top.location.href == self.location) {
top.location.href = "URL of your frame file";
}
----

Reason №2: You are using a lot of pictures on your Web site but very little text

Search engines need text to index your Web site. They cannot know what's written on your GIF or JPEG images. If you use a lot of images on your Web site, you should also create some Web pages that have a lot of text.

Some Web site promotion consultants will tell you to create so-called doorway pages. A doorway page is a Web page that contains plain text and a link to your main Web page. On that doorway page, you should describe the content of your Web site in many sentences that contain many keywords that are important for your Web site.

However, some search engines only lists Web pages if at least one remote Web page is linking to it. In that case, a doorway page will not work. Don't use doorway pages for search engine spamming! Only use doorways that have something to do with the content of your Web pages.

Note that many search engines already ignore doorway pages. For that reason, try to give your real Web site as much content (text) as possible. Fresh, continuously updated content is one of the best ways to ensure that your visitors will return again and again.

Here are 2 tips for building and distributing your content:

1. Build one page of quality content per day. Write timely, topical articles with about 250-500 words. And find the core set of keywords for your topic area. Those are your subject starters.

2. Stay abreast of developments in your sector. If the big site "ABC" is coming out with product "XYZ" in autumn, then write about the product or the product sector in general and have it ready in June so that search engines can index it early. For example, all the Nintendo GameCube sites you can find in Google today - those have been submitted 3-4 months ago.

Reason №3: The submitted Web page is only a redirection.

If the Web page you submit contains a redirection to another Web site, most search engines will skip your Web site completely. Do not submit a redirection Web page.

Many webmasters tried to cheat search engines with redirection pages in the past. The search engines companies discovered that and they decided to totally skip Web pages with redirections.

Submit a real Web page that contains the product description visible to the reader.

Sometimes, you have old Web pages listed on search engines and you want them to redirect to the new Web site. There are several ways to do it:

1. You can implement a server side redirect on the old Web page, using the 301 Moved Permanently error message. This will redirect users to the new Web site, but also tells the search engines that this page has moved permanently. Some search engines will drop the page from their index, and some will eventually replace the old page with the new one without hurting your rankings.

2. You can use the META Refresh tag on the old Web page, for example <META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.stakh.com"> tells the browser to load www.stakh.com 5 seconds after the current document has finished loading. However, some old Web browsers don't support that tag, and some search engines penalize pages that use a refresh of a few seconds or less.

3. Instead of the META Refresh tag, you can also use JavaScript to load a new document:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
location.replace("http://www.yournewsite.com");
-->
</SCRIPT>

Note that some search engines also don't like that kind of redirection.

4. You can also delete the old Web page and create a custom 404 error page. This ensures that visitors will be redirected to the new site if they click on a broken link or enter an incorrect URL. The 404 error page should contain a link to your home page and to the primary sections of your Web site.

To move to a new Web site and to keep your old search engine rankings, I recommend using method 1.

 

Reason №4: You have submitted your Web site too often.

If you submit your Web site more often than once a month, most search engines will consider that spamming and they will skip your site.

Spamming does not work with search engines. Most likely, it will backfire to you. More and more search engines are able to detect spam attempts and penalize or ban your page from their listings.

Sites that spam search engines degrade the value of search engine listings. As the problem grows, these sites may face the same backlash that spam mail generates. The content of most Web pages ought to be enough for search engines to determine relevancy without webmasters having to resort to repeating keywords for no reason other than to try and "beat" other Web pages. The stakes will simply keep rising, and users will also begin to hate sites that undertake these measures.

Submit your Web site to search engines and wait for 4 weeks. Then search for the URL of your site. If the search engine cannot find your site, submit your URL again.

Reason №5: You overuse keywords on your Web site.

Many search engines fear to be spammed if you overuse keywords on your Web site. Do not repeat your keywords too often in your meta tags or in the body of your Web pages.

Nobody knows the magic number for the search engines but a paragraph such as the one below is not a good idea:

"E-books are great. I love e-books. I've read hundreds of ebooks. You can learn much from e-books. On my Web site you can find tons of free e-books. When you subscribe to my newsletter on e-books, you get two additional free e-books."

Some years ago, you may have obtained a top ranking for the keyword "ebooks", but today the search engines will quickly ignore such nonsense and probably write it off as "spamming". It could even cause the engine spider to skip your Web site completely.

Unfortunately, search engines do not indicate on their help pages the maximum allowed number of repetitions. Some webmasters suspect this to be three, some say six. There's no way of knowing until you are penalised.

Reason №6: Text in the background color of the web

"Color can kill your ranking!" Some Web designers, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their Web pages as keyword-rich as possible. They try to spam search engines by repeating keywords in the same color as the background color to make the text invisible to browsers and search engine spiders.

However, almost all search engines already know that trick. They will penalize or even blacklist your Web page if they determine that your page is trying to unfairly misrepresent its actual content. This tactic is commonly referred to as "spamming the search engines" or "spamdexing".

Unfortunately, the problem is that the search engines may end up penalizing Web sites which did not intend to use the hidden text trick. For example, suppose you have a Web page with a black background and a table in that page with a white background. Now suppose that you've added some black text in that table. This text will be visible to your human visitors, so in fact, the text isn't hidden. However, the
search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they overlook the table background color.

I recommend going through all your Web pages and make sure that you haven't inadvertently made any such mistake.

And, by the way, search engines also catch on using a slightly different color than the background color to hide words, so don't use that trick.

Copyright © 2003 Stakh SEO News ST-K