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Link Popularity

Your key to high search engine ranking

It seems like more and more search engines are using link popularity as a part of their ranking process. Google certainly follows this method and uses it as its most important factor for ranking sites. Other big search engines like Altavista, Hotbot, MSN, Lycos, Northern Light, Inktomi, Excite are following by using link popularity as part of their their ranking algorithms.
What is Link Popularity?

Literally speaking, link popularity means the number of sites linking to your site. However, this does not mean that you should aim at getting thousands of sites linking to yours. However, if you are aiming to get a high ranking in the search engines, you need to know that the quality of links is more important that the quantity of links. If your site is linked to many popular sites then you are sure to get a higher ranking than if it is linked to hundreds of unpopular sites. The idea behind link popularity is that other sites will link to you only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So, if many sites link to you it follows that you are a popular site and therefore deserve a high ranking.
Look at link popularity as a way of getting more traffic to your site. So, by getting other sites linking to you, you are not only ranked higher in the search engines, you also have a large volume of targeted traffic coming to your site.

With the competition increasing daily, getting a good ranking in the search engines is of utmost importance. If you really want a high ranking with the search engines, you need to follow a focussed linking strategy.

Let's look at some of the linking strategies you can adopt:

1. Writing articles on your area of expertise
Writing quality articles is a sure way of attracting visitors to your site. What could be easier than writing what you know about? So write a great article, find sites that are related to your area of service and submit your article to all those sites. If it's a quality article it's a sure bet. For e.g. we offer free website design and promotion tutorials on our site.

2. Reciprocal Links
Asking webmasters of other sites to link to you is a good way of getting links to your site. Politely ask the webmaster (preferably using their name) to add your link to their site. You could tell them that you have added their link to your site, give them a brief description of what your site is about and how it will fit into their site. If you have a good site most probably other sites will want to link to you.
Tip: A great way to find people who may be willing to link to you is to check your competition's link popularity through a search engine. You can do this by typing: link:/www.yoursite.com or through an online tool such as linkpopularity.com.

Other link popularity strategies involve submitting to FFA'a or Free For All page and submitting to all the major and minor directories.

Finally, every week or so, make a list of the new sites which you know have linked to you over the past week. Also, have a look at your site statistics and find out the new sites from which you have received traffic. Submit each of these pages to the search engines. This ensures that the search engines have spidered the pages which are linked to you.

10 Tips To Effective Search Engine Submission And Promotion

# Meta tags
The first and most important step is to create relevant meta tags after studying your competition and coming up with the most important keywords for you site. All the pages in your web site must have the relevant keywords, title and description.

# Keywords in your Content
The keywords used in your meta tags should be repeated in your content - specially in the heading and the first paragraph.

# Alt Tags
Put your keywords in the image alt tags. Some search engines index the alt tags.
The golden rule for effective search engine submission is that all your important keywords should appear in your title, description, content and alt tags of your web page. This increases your keyword density and helps in boosting your ranking with the search engines.

# Create Doorway Pages
Create doorway pages for your most important keywords. These keyword specific pages will rank higher in the search engines and can be used as a doorway to your site.

# Site Readiness
Directory submissions are reviewed by people, so make sure your site is 100% complete before submitting it.

# No special Symbols in your URL
Don't put any special symbols in your URL (e.g. &, %,=, $ ,? ). Search engines cannot recognize these symbols.

# Don't Spam
Try to stay in the search engines' good books by not spamming. Spamming includes excessive keyword repetition, machine generated doorway pages with little or no content and pages that contain invisible text.

# Submit to the Major Search Engines and Directories
Make sure you have submitted your web site to the 10 big search engines and directories. Most of your traffic will be generated from these search engines. Keep checking to see if your web site is indexed. Dmoz, Direct Hit and Inktomi seem to be gaining a lot of importance so make sure that you are listed in these sites. Their results are used by a number of other important search engines.

# Don't change the URL of your pages after submission
Never change the path of any of your web pages after submitting your web site. Don't rename a file or change the file extension. This can really hurt your promotion efforts because it will show up as a dead link in the search results page.

# Be Patient
Don't expect miracles overnight. It may take anywhere from 2 weeks to 5 months to be indexed in the big search engines and directories. Keep checking every week and be patient. Continue to add quality content to your site. That will be a sure winner.

Web Site Statistics

Analyzing your site traffic to know your visitors

Using a web site statistics tool is an absolute must for all those of you you are serious about site promotion and Internet marketing. You need a reliable traffic analysis tool to know what are your total hits, how many visitors are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and other important visitor information.

Lets see how web site statistics can help us. We have explained some important terms that you will come across while analyzing your statistics and how you can use them to understand your traffic.

* Visitor/Unique: A visitor is a unique person that visits your site. He/She may travel through many pages in your site but will be counted as only one person. E.g. After reading this article you may choose to click on some of our other articles on web site promotion. Whether you read only this article or many articles, our statistics will show you as one visitor.

* Hit or Page View: The number of times your web site has been hit i.e. Each time a page is viewed on your web site it is a counted as a hit or a page view. E.g. Every time you click on one of our links our hits will increase by one.

This information is very useful and needs to be tracked on a regular basis to see if your hits and visitors are increasing, decreasing or remaining stagnant. At one glance you will be able see if your promotion efforts are paying off or not (If your visitors and hits are continuously increasing it is fantastic).

You should also check if your page views are proportionately much higher than your visitors. If it is, its good news! This means that your visitors are interested in what your site has to offer and are moving around the site. If it is almost the same or just double then it means visitors are only viewing one or two pages and then clicking out of your site. Tip: Make sure you have a good navigation system so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for.

Other Terms

* Referrer Domain: This is the URL through which your visitors come to your site. It could be a search engine, directory or just another site that has linked to you. Using referrer information you can find out where your visitors are coming from and where you are getting the most traffic from. It is also a useful way to find out if you are indexed and ranked high on a particular search engine. As soon as you see visitors coming to your site through a particular search engine you know that you are indexed and ranked pretty high. If you find that even after 2-3 months you aren't getting visitors from certain search engines, it probably means you are either not indexed in their database or are not ranked high.

* Stats by monitored page: This tells you the hits for each of your pages. Through these stats you will be able to tell which are your most popular pages and which pages are not being visit. Use your popular pages to draw visitors within the site. Give them a special offer or put cool links to get them to visit the rest of your site. Resubmit or work on the pages that are not getting hits.

These are some of the important things that you must look at. Other useful information includes hourly stats, browsers and platforms, stats by location and weekly and monthly stats.


A friendly piece of advice - Be patient :)

Don't expect visitors to come flocking to your site right after you submit your site to the search engines and directories. Search Engines will take approx. 2-3 weeks to index your site and since directories are reviewed by people they will take much longer, sometimes upto 6 months. Be patient and use this time to develop quality content in your site that you can promote by getting other sites to link to you. But don't forget to check your site statistics everyday.

Free Search Engine Submission Sites

There are plenty of free search engine submission tools available on the Net. While some of them promise to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, my personal favorites are those that submit web sites to only 20-40 major search engines. The reason is simple - these search engines generate approximately 85% of web site traffic. I hardly get any traffic from the other search engines.
First time submission? Do it manually

Before telling you about the search engine submission tools available, I'd like to tell you that it's really easy to submit to search engines and I recommend very strongly that you submit manually. I have made a page that gives you the URLs of the submit pages of all the major search engines, and tips to submit to these engines. It will only take an hour or two of your time and you will be able to see the confirmation of your URL being submitted. You can read my article on Search Engine Submission and find out just how easy it is.
Use free tools to update or resubmit

You must be wondering why I'm recommending manual submission, when this article is about free automatic search engine submission services. Well, as these free tools are available on the Net we should make use of them. Here's what I suggest - After manually submitting to all the search engines your web site promotion efforts are not over. You have to resubmit every 2 months or so and also submit new pages that you have added to your web site That's when you should use these tools. Try them out and update your site in the search engines in just seconds.
Free Search Engine Submission Sites/Tools

* Submit Corner
You'll like this submission tool because it allows you to choose the search engines you want to submit to. This wizard usually takes under 30 seconds and you'll have your site submitted to the top engines instantly. It also has other cool tools you can use to optimize and improve your web site. It's a great resource site!
http://www.submitcorner.com/Tools/Submit/

* Submitplus
Good tool because you have to fill only two fields (Email and URL) and their service effectively submits your web site to the top 10 search engines in less than 1 minute! Its other cool features include real time status reporting, live confirmation link and an email report.
http://www.submitplus.com/top10.htm

* Cyberid
Simply fill in the form and click 'Submit' - you will be able to verify each entry by clicking the relevant hyperlink. They also have a FREE Meta-Tag Builder that you can use to ensure that your tags are optimized for the Search Engine Spiders.
http://www.cyberid.co.uk/submit.htm

* Add Me
Submit your site to the top 30 most popular search engines and directories.
http://www.addme.com/submission.htm

* Webtoolcentral
Here's another simple form to fill up. You can also choose the search engines that you want to submit to.
http://www.webtoolcentral.com/webmaster/tools/site_submit/