Not All Links Are Created EqualWritten by Rob Francis
When it comes to any website promotion campaign, there are two main areas to focus on. The first area to focus on is your internal campaign, which deals with anything you can do to pages of your website, such as content, meta tags, and titles. This is completely within your control even if you use a Web designer to do any changes for you, as you can dictate what is on your website. The other area to focus on is your external campaign, which largely deals with getting links from other sites – something that is mostly out of your control and is usually a lot more work.Internal Campaign Links, or hyperlinks to use their full name, are often misunderstood by people wanting to improve their search engine ranking. Links from your website going out to other sites will not boost your search engine ranking, although some relevant, on-topic links to prominent sites can help. Also, creating lots of links to your internal pages is not same as links from other websites in eyes of search engines. These two misunderstandings have caught out many a website owner. The important thing to remember is that you do not want to have too many links on your pages. This does two things that can be deemed harmful to your goal of improving search engine ranking. Having a large list of links on a single page can cause search engines to suspect a link farm, Web ring, or other such unnatural linking structure and your site may be penalized for this. It would be safest to keep number of links below 50 for any page. The second reason that you don't want too many links is because they drain PR (PageRank). This basically means that importance of page, PR, is divided by number of outbound links. So you would be better of getting a link from a website page that has a PR of 6 and only 10 outbound links rather than a PR 6 website page with 200 outbound links. External Campaign The real value in links, as far as gaining better ranking in search engines comes from external links. External links are also known as backlinks, and they basically are just links to your website from someone else's website. There are two types of external links – reciprocal and one-way. Reciprocal links are links from a website in exchange for a return link to that same website. Hence term reciprocal. Reciprocal links were very popular a few years back but are not as valuable as one-way links. If another site is relevant to theme of your site then a reciprocal link is still useful so don't dismiss it entirely. What you really want is a one-way link to your website in order to boost your rankings. Gaining one-way links usually comes from supllying a brilliant resource or software. If your site is deemed to contain lots of excellent information that is freely available and original then many others will be happy to place one-way links to your site.
| | How to Build Link Popularity - The Natural WayWritten by Sean Odom
Link popularity is number of relevant quality inbound links pointing to your website. Most major search engines use link popularity as part of their algorithm which helps to determine relevance of your website. Exchanging Links is Not Always Best Way One of most prevalent ways to develop link popularity is by exchanging links. But it is not necessarily best way. First, exchanging links willy-nilly with anyone you can find willing to do so is not a good tactic. It doesn't help your site visitors if you link to irrelevant, poor quality sites. It makes your site look trashy. And it doesn't help your search engine ranking either. In fact, if you're exchanging links too carelessly you could be pegged as a link farm and actually banned from search engines. The right way to exchange links is by finding quality, relevant sites with which to exchange links. These are links that search engines care about. But process of finding right sites and then convincing webmaster or site owner to exchange with you is a time consuming process. Time better spent, we believe, on building link popularity right way: natural way. Link Popularity and Great Content Search engines include link popularity as part of their ranking algorithm based on theory that if you have great content, offer a valuable service, or sell a product people want, then people will naturally link to you. So what's wrong with doing just that? The first step to building better link popularity natural way is to improve your website. Spend time you would have spend searching for link exchange partners on creating sticky content for you site instead. Press Releases If your company or website does anything even mildly noteworthy, write a press release and distribute it on web. There are several paid and free press release distribution services that will post your press release with a link back to your site. Take advantage of them. Affiliate Programs Start an affiliate program. Offer to pay per click through or per sale that originates at your affiliate's sites. They'll link to you as affiliates and you'll have more inbound links. Offer Free Articles or Tools Write articles in your area of expertise or create free web-based tools. Offer articles or tools free to anyone, and ask only for a link back as payment. Directory Links Directories are crucial for building link popularity and targeted traffic. Directories are broken down into specific categorical topics followed by subtopics. A quality link from a major directory carries more relevance and weight than scores of links from websites that aren't relevant to your website, product or service.
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