Other Directories

Other small but notable directories that you should consider are joeAnt, GoGuides and Gimpsy. Don’t expect large traffics from these directories; however, they will help enhance your link popularity. Link popularity is a concept which means- how many sites have links pointed towards your website. Link popularity is important because your website’s rank in search results depends on it in a big way.

Search Engines

Search engines use special programs to crawl Internet and index web pages. These robot programs are called “Bot” or “Spider”. Spiders crawl up Internet using links. That’s why it is so important to have back links to your website. When you make a search, search engines show you results that are retrieved from servers, where all indexed web pages are cached. Only when you click on a link from search result you see real web page.

The most important search engines are Google, Altavista, AllTheWeb, Teoma, Lycos and MSN, HotBot, AOL Search, etc. Google

No doubt that Google is best search engine available on Internet today. According to Google, they have indexed over 3.5 billion pages up to now! More Internet surfers are prone to use Google because it has great search enhancing functions, and you can always expect relevant and quality search results.

You can submit your link using Google’s Add URL page located at http://www.google.com/addURL.html. However, if you have links pointing towards your site on other websites, you can be sure that Google’s spider, Googlebot will eventually come and index you site. Contrary to popular believe once your site is indexed, there is not need to resubmit your pages to Google, even if you updated pages. If, although it is not necessary, you submit your website to Google, submit only index page, it will find rest of pages using links anyway. Altavista

Once powerful, Altavista started to loose grounds to other search engines in a big way. Submitting to Altavista is fairly simple! From home page click on “Submit a Site” located at bottom of page. There are two choices for you: either you can choose “Basic Submit” service, which is free or for an immediate inclusion, you can choose “Express Inclusion” service.

To prevent automatic submission of URLs, on submission page Altavista added submission code that has to be inserted manually along with URL. The Express Inclusion service costs US $39 for first URL for six months. AllTheWeb

This search engine is becoming quite popular lately. It has a very large database. AllTheWeb has very sophisticated search functions like searches for pages linked to a given page, searches within URLs or page titles, and searches limited by page size. It provides search results and technology to Lycos and Ebay. Submission to AllTheWeb is quite easy. Use following link page to submit your URL: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_URL.php If you need an express inclusion, you have to use “Lycos InSite“ service of Terra-Lycos. The rate is US $35 for a full year inclusion.

Teoma

If you care about Teoma, a much hyped search engine, which is actually an additional search engine of Ask Jeeves, you can use its paid inclusion program located at http://ask.ineedhits.com/sitesubmit.asp?id=30270. It charges US $30 per year for first URL and US $18 for additional each.

Inktomi

You may not heard about Inktomi, but many popular search engines use results from Inktomi such as AOL, Excite, Go.com, HotBot, IWon, Overture to name a few. For secondary search result even MSN uses it! Yahoo! recently bought Inktomi. Which means that very soon even Yahoo! might give priority to search results coming from it. Inktomi provides a paid inclusion service. Inktomi sells its inclusion service exclusively through its reseller partners. You can find them over here: http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html The fee is US $39 per URL for a year and US$25 for subsequent URLs.

To check out your site's Page rank, download Google Toolbar from http:/ oolbar.google.com/ and install. After that, go to your website. On tool bar, you will see rank of your index page in a scale of 0 to 10. The rating is considered good if it is five or more.

Make sure, while exchanging links you select websites that have page rank no less than yours.

How to find websites that you should swap links with?

The easiest way is to check out backward links to website of your most prominent Internet based competitor or industry leader of your field. Other option is to run a search based on most relevant keywords to your website and check out backward links to first ten websites.

In search box of Google, Altavista and AllTheWeb type link: and then URL of site to view all sites that have backward links to this site. Visit these sites to find best one to exchange links and then contact them with a nice email.

I will also suggest you to check out number of visitors site receives before offering a link swap. The tool that will help you figuring out quantity of traffic a site gets, you can download from http://download.alexa.com/ by clicking on button “Free Tool Bar”. This is also a very good tool to analyze web traffic. The tool also shows which other similar sites people tend to visit alongside with site that you are viewing now.

If a site gets significantly less visitors than yours, what is point of having a link form that site?

While looking for websites to swap links, don’t forget about your partners, suppliers and buyers. These sites are capable of bringing major traffic and are indeed relevant to your site’s subject matter!

Your link popularity campaign should also include following methods. However, mind it, these techniques require tedious work from your side.

Issue Press Releases

Press releases are a good way of exposing your website to mass and increase your link popularity. Whenever you are coming up with a new product or service, overhauling your website, adding new elements to your site or conducting a seminar, etc. you should issue a press release. It is also a very cost effective method of getting publicity for your site. To broadcast your press release you can use one of free media release sites: http://www.prweb.com

Write Articles

If you are dedicated to popularize your website, you must have substantial knowledge of subject related to your website. Why not, write articles on your subjects of expertise and circulate them on Internet and post on your website? Apart from this will add good content to your website, if other websites and newsletters publish your articles, you will get free publicity and increase your link popularity.

Build an Affiliate Program

If you sell a product or service through your website, you should seriously consider developing an affiliate program for your site. An affiliate program is when a visitor from your affiliate’s site comes to your site using link that you provided to affiliate and buy something; affiliate will get a commission from you. The affiliate program can expand your business substantially. Since your affiliates require posting your links on their sites, this increases your link popularity as well.

Participate in Discussion Groups and Forums

This is also a great way of increasing your link popularity. There are literally thousands of discussion groups and forums on every conceivable subject on Internet. You should actively participate in some of them, those which are most relevant to your area of expertise. The signature along with your website address that you post there while asking a question or answering to a question also boosts your link popularity.

Link Exchange Programs

You can also participate one of link swap programs available on Internet. Unfortunately, most of automated link exchange offers that you receive through them are random and irrelevant to your site. But, however, I would suggest you to give them a try, as chances are there that you still might receive some good offers. You can also actively search for sites to swap links in their directories.

Development of link popularity is an on going process. You have to work on this constantly. But, outcome that you might achieve from your endeavor also could be significant.