Improve the Link Popularity of your site

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:

http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml
http://certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm

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 here.

 

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.

Click here to
learn more about the software.

Article by Sumantra Roy. Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine placement, subscribe to
his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank email to mailto:1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.net

Just Subscribe & Win $100, 125x125 Ad Spots, 1000 Entrecard credits n more...