Link Begging
Link Popularity
In order for your website or blog posts to be seen you have to be found when someone searches in Search Engines like Google. You must understand that the majority of your traffic will come from search engines, so Google becomes your number one customer.
Would you want to dis your number one? I don’t think so.
You need to know how to please the Gods of Google, and they will reward you. Trust me.
The first thing you have to do is make Google aware of your existence.
Google usually does this by finding a link from a website it knows about to your site. Then Google “discovers” you. You can also submit your site directly to Google, however, Google gives higher value to the amount of websites that are “talking” about you, that is linking to you.
Your goal is to have as many high quality links from various websites linking to yours. These are called inbound links. (see the image bleow)
Yes the reputation of the referring site has an impact on the value of a link.
For example, it would be better if a website like The Drudge Report linked to you as opposed to Sammy’s Vacuum Cleaner Service.
How do you get folks to link to you?
This question created what I call “Link Begging”, you have to go out and beg for links.
Seriously, you have to ask. When you met someone in the old days, you may exchange fax numbers, now you swap email addresses, and you should always say: “Hey, you got a website?” If they say “Yup.” you ask them to link to you. If they say no, you tell them to visit BlogsOfSteel.com.
You see how I snuck my site in there?
The other thing you do is visit websites or blogs, usually related to your topic and start commenting. Often you are asked to provide your website address, you should be blasting your domain name or URL as often and as many places as you can.
There are many business directories, or sites that list businesses, usually in a category or businesses related to their site. Often you can submit your business information and most importantly your website address called your URL.
Google calls this “Web Page Link Popularity”
Web Page Link Popularity
As the Web continues on its path of relentless growth, search engines are increasingly relying on a new measurement called link popularity to help identify the most relevant Web pages for a specific query.
The idea behind link popularity is simple, yet elegant. If someone likes a Web page enough to create a link to it from another page, that amounts to a vote of approval for the page. By tallying up all of the links to a page, it’s possible to compare the “votes” for that page with all others focusing on the same subject.
In essence, link popularity lets a search engine tap into the collective wisdom of the Web rather than using its own fancy internal methods to assess the quality of a page. Highly regarded pages will have lots of links pointing to them, so they’re likely to be higher-quality pages than those with few links pointing to them. It’s almost like a peer review process for Web pages.
Link popularity isn’t a perfect measure. Newly created pages recently added to the Web, no matter how outstanding they might be, will score poorly on link popularity measures. It takes time for people to hear about great new pages and link to them. Similarly, even poor documents may score highly if they cover a rare topic and they’ve been on the Web for years, simply because people linked to one of the few available sources of information about that particular subject. Those links persist, though they may not have been updated for years.
Click on image for larger one
