Link Popularity and Link Building Suggestions
Some search engines (eg Google) use Link Popularity as a significant ranking tool.
Link Popularity rating uses to factors:
- The Number of links to your website
- The Quality of links to your website (as perceived by the search engine - so links from a "good" website are better).
The logic being applied is:
If other good websites consider your website important enough to link to then it must be important.
However this only works for genuine links from relevant websites:
- The search engines don't want "artificially created" (or useless) links and are likely to penalise your website if it considers this is the case
- The search engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site.
Building Links
Ask complementary to swap links with your website:
- Ask them to link to your website while outlining the benefits of doing so and offer to link back to them in exchange
- Or ask permission to link to their website and you might state that a link back is appreciated but not required
- Ensure you have developed genuine content on your of interest to complementary site
- Put their link in place so they can see it
- Look over their web site and suggest where a link to you might be appropriate
- Give them the exact link text to use, even going so far as to put it in
HTML so they can just cut/paste it onto their page. Give them all the information
they need to make it easy for them to link to you. If they have a big web
site that's divided into sections, give them the exact URL of where your
web site would fit in.
Finding complementary websites to link to:
- Use the major search engines. Search for your target keywords. Look at the pages that appear in the top results. These are the best ones according to the search engines
- Check the link popularity of your competitors, and find out who are linking to them. Contact those Web sites, and ask them to link to you
- Search the sites of the people who have linked to you for other possible link partners
- Others:
- Suppliers, Customers, Friends, Trade Organisations, Groups, Clubs, Directories, Search Engines
Please remember: Abuse by participarting in links farms or large volumes of clearly inappropriate (not relevant) links often results in a penalty rather than a search engine ratings boost.
Become a Content Provider:
Give people a reason to link to you. Sites are linked to for a reason: usually if they provide the most information or the best resources on a particular topic. If you are not a writer, ask the writers if you can use their stuff. The writer gets a link from you. And you get great content. Some ideas:
- Write press releases
- Write articles for other popular sites
- Write a testimonial for a product or service
- Allow others to use your content if the attribute and link back to you
- Give interviews
- Give awards
You can read more advice on providing good content here at www.epsilis.co.uk.
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