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How to Gain Extra Traffic with Increased Link Popularity

Link Popularity, Search Engine Marketing, Building Traffic

For most web surfers Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool your potential customers are likely to use to find the products and services they need. So part of your internet marketing strategy must be improving your search rankings. Increasingly search engines are looking at Link Popularity to measure the worth of your site. This is why link popularity is so crucial to climbing up the search engine results.

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. More links to your site from 'authority sites' = greater link popularity = higher position in search engine results. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than 'link farms' - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to 'Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.' BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper and submit your listing to the 'Fine Alpaca Wool' category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects and both of your sites' link popularity.

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It's a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don't sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it's time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way, make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Nick Summers runs Content Country Article Directory, a directory dedicated to offering the best of the web's articles formatted the way you want them. Visit http://www.contentcountry.com today for all your content requirements.

7 Days To Complete Search Engine Domination - Day 1

Optimize The Wrong Keywords And You'll Likely Never See Results ...

Used by permission by: http://seoelite.com

URL Trackback: http://seoelite.com/HTML_SEOLesson1.htm

Note: Before you begin, if you're NOT 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, don't read another word. Only read on if you plan to put everything I will be teaching you into action. At the top of this lesson you'll notice a download link. I like giving readers this option so that you can print off each of the lessons and take notes as you go along.

Ok, now on to lesson 1...

If you're anything like I was when I first began online, you've probably created a brand new website. Maybe submitted it to a few search engines and hoped that people would mysteriously show up at your site and buy whatever it is you were selling. After a couple of weeks go by and only a few stray people show up at your website, you might even try and "optimize" your website around your main keyword in hopes that you just might rank well in 1 of the millions of search engines. Another couple of weeks go by and still no luck. No visitors... and no money. What a waste!

At this point you probably give up and decide to either build another website around a different market or just lose all hope and quit. Well, news flash, as you've probably figured out by now, this is NOT the way to go about doing things. These days you can't just create a bunch of websites and expect people to just show up at your website and buy your "stuff". This was possible back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, but not anymore, as you've probably found out by now.

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Let's go through a VERY specific example of what your very first steps MUST be when creating any website... no matter what the subject matter. You'll find that I don't teach theories. I like to give specific, real life examples using both descriptions AND screenshots (pictures). I'm a visual person, so I learn best with picture examples. So, if you're also a visual person, you're going to learn quite a bit in these lessons, so pay close attention.

In our example, let's create a weight loss related website. Before we start creating and collecting content for the website, we need to do a little keyword research. This is VERY important and should not be skipped. To do our keyword research we need to, first, visit a few websites.

The first of which should be http://www.goodkeywords.com/.

They have a very good keyword tool, and best of all it's free! Once we've downloaded this software, we can enter the most generic keyword for our website into the software. In our example, our keyword would be "weight loss". You'll notice that in the screenshot below, Good Keywords will return a list of related terms. The "count" column will then show us how many times the specific keyword has been searched for in the previous month within the Overture.com search engine. Generally, you can multiply that number by 8, in order to estimate the number of times that keyword has been searched within Google for the previous month. You'll notice that the keyword weight loss was searched 817,038 times during the previous month. DO NOT start off by optimizing for the keyword "weight loss" Why, you ask? If a keyword is searched that many times in Overture, then 100 times out of 100, the competition you will have to outrank will be extremely fierce.

Not only is the competition fierce, but think about it... How targeted is the keyword "weight loss" anyway? Not very targeted at all. Someone searching for the keyword "weight loss" could very well be looking for free information on weight loss. They might be looking for the definition of weight loss. It's really hard telling. Chances are, they're not looking for anything specific about losing weight. This is not something you should try to take on. For a brand new website, or one you're just beginning to optimize, it's better to select more specific "long tail" keyword phrases. I'll talk about this a bit later.

Let's take a quick peek at Google so I can show you exactly how many websites are competing for this keyword. If you were to optimize your website for this keyword, you'd be competing against over 66 million other websites! I don't know about you, but that's an aweful lofty goal to start with.

By the end of this course, you will be able to eventually target super high traffic, targeted, keywords, but it's always best to start off on the keywords with less competition. Get some traffic with those keywords, and THEN as your website gets older and you build some authority in the search engines you can focus on optimizing for the larger keywords.

Ok, so back to finding which keywords we want to target... Read full article on http://seoelite.com/HTML_SEOLesson1.htm

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Website Promotion optimization

promote your site right!

SEO Articles may be a new area for many webmasters and designers. Website Promotion is more than On-Page Search engine optimization, and it more than covers Off-Page optimization as well. Website Promotion should pave the way, or at least be apart of, the beginning stages of Web Standards.

But for the typical website designer, the design takes precedence, including the graphics and layout (table less designs please - let's not revert to talking about web semantics!). So to put SEO on their plate, well... most of us will buckle under the pressure!

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Website creation today, with template driven sites, and Photoshop layouts becoming more and more popular, neither Website Promotion or web accessibility are as important as they should be.

Design and promotion!

So what exactly is Website Promotion? Website Promotion is the advertising and optimizing - before and after the creation - of websites. The before of promotion is in SE Optimization of a site. This includes On-Page and Off-Page SEO. Ox-Page optimization is critical in Website Promotion. They are the techniques that enable a site to be SE friendly.

Here are great Search Engine Optimization tips and other resources:

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