Why Links to Your Site Matter to the Search Engines (and What You Can Do About It!)Written by Scott T. Smith
The number of other sites that link to your Web site is highly important today to these major search engines: Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, and WebCrawler. If you have lots of sites linking to yours, your site is considered 'relevant', significant and deserving of a top 10-30 rank.If you don't have many links... You've got to be concerned about this NOW. The Internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and at same time is swelling in size. Search engines are continually refining way they determine top Web site positioning, but count on this: Link relevancy - number of sites linking to yours - will play an increasingly important role. There are three key ways you can generate links to your site: 1. Develop Your Content If you make it worthwhile to link to your site, 'they will come'. According to Forrester Research, continually adding high-quality content accounts for up to 75% of repeat visitors to your site. Creating a resource area for people and encouraging them to link to your site will generate a certain number of links back to you. 2. Be Proactive: Ask For Links Find sites that reach same audience you do, and ask each individual Webmaster for a link. Obviously, this will work only if you are not a direct competitor of theirs, AND you offer something of genuine value which they don't already have on their site. Carefully tailor each request you make to individual site, and indicate on which page of site you feel your link belongs. Obviously, these two steps are very labor-intensive, painstaking and will eat up considerable time, which is why third way to generate links to your site is an excellent (and quick!) option.
| | How to get listed at NBCiWritten by Lauri Harpf
NBCi, previously known as Snap, is a big portal that was created by combining several well known sites together. Among other things, it offers entertainment and news to its visitors. But we're not really interested about those things, are we? What interests us is that NBCi gets lots of visitors and has its own independent directory which is used every time these visitors want to do a search. This means that you can use NBCi to boost traffic of your site, but first you must understand how NBCi directory system works.The NBCi system is pretty unique when compared to some other major directories, such as Yahoo and Open Directory Project. The two others have a simple system for reviewing sites - you submit a site, a human visits it and either includes it in directory or rejects submission. With NBCi, things are different. The LiveDirectory - what it is and how it works ================================ When users submit their sites to NBCi, they are placed in NBCi LiveDirectory. The LiveDirectory is arranged into categories, just as 'regular' NBCi directory, but there are two major differences. The first difference is that LiveDirectory results are only shown to users when no matches in regular directory can be found, or when all matches in regular directory have already been shown. This means that LiveDirectory gets used less than regular directory, and sites listed in LiveDirectory generally get less traffic than those in regular directory. By now, you're probably asking yourself 'Well, how heck am I going to get to regular directory if all new submissions are placed in LiveDirectory?'. It's actually pretty simple and is connected to second major difference between LiveDirectory and regular directory. The thing is, submissions to LiveDirectory are not really reviewed by humans. The LiveDirectory is pretty much like a search engine, only difference is that it is organized into categories. There is very little control as to what gets into LiveDirectory - just about everything can get in, if it's not something completely sick or entirely worthless (this lack of control does not however mean that widespread abuse wouldn't be noticed). After you're in LiveDirectory, you get ranked and are placed in LiveDirectory results. What about part of getting into regular directory? Hold on, we're getting there.. You see, LiveDirectory results serve as a 'springboard' to regular directory. Every time a user clicks at a LiveDirectory site result, NBCi database takes note. When a LiveDirectory site has received enough clicks, it attracts attention of NBCi staff who then send a human to review site. If site is deemed good enough, it is promoted to regular directory and owner is notified. NBCi figures that this kind of a system eases their workload - a Yahoo-style outfit has to review all sites submitted to it, while NBCi lets users to do initial screening by tracking their clicks, and only sends human reviewers to best of LiveDirectory sites. How to get past LiveDirectory to regular directory ==================================== You have two choices. The first is to pay $99 review fee (goes up to $199 in at end of February, 2001). If you don't want to pay, you must go through LiveDirectory.
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