Thursday, August 21, 2008

Link Popularity - 101

Having links to your website is essential for any online marketer or webmaster looking for a way to get their website noticed. There are several benefits to having links:

1) It increases your ranking in search engines. Search engines like Google and Yahoo use link popularity to valuate the ranking of a particular website. For instance Google has a toolbar that people can download onto their computer and it shows the page ranking of every website you visit. Link popularity plays a major role when Google computes this page ranking for these websites.

Websites you can use to check the link popularity of your website and find other information pertaining to your website includes:

Alexa.com

MarketLeap.com

2) You can drive traffic to your website. This is a great way to receive targeted traffic for your product or services. Somebody sees your link on a website relevant to yours and then clicks on it and instantly becomes a targeted visitor. Not all traffic you're going to receive is going to come from search engines and you should not just rely on this type of traffic because despite what some individuals claim, high ranking cannot be guaranteed and no one knows the precise algorithms such search engines use. Not to mention that they are always continually changing. The goal is to bring traffic to your site and influence them to continually revisit.

3) Link building also builds credibility. When people consistently see your name and link it builds up brand awareness and makes you seem like an expert within your field.

Even though link building is a great way to get your website noticed there are many things you have to be careful of. Search engines are very savy when it comes to checking the legitimacy of websites. Link spamming and any other sort of illegal tactics will negatively effect your website. Therefore it is very important to not to follow programs that promise you thousands of links and etc. I remember reading a comment by someone who was using one of the popular link building services and they said that their link popularity actually decreased as a result of them using the service.

Another thing to consider is that not every link is the same or at least not in the eye of the search engines. There are basically two types of links search engines play importance to. One is reciprocal links and the other is one-way links. Reciprocal links is basically when you and another website owner exchange links. Thus the term reciprocal. These terms are considered good if your exchanging links with someone who has a website relevant to yours. One-way links is just what it sounds like a one-way link pointing back to your site. Search engines give this the most importance because they consider that a website must be of some value if they have other websites pointing to them. So, in a sense one-way links give you some sort of cyberspace credibility.

Anchor text also plays an importance. Anchor text is the text that is referenced when a link is clicked on. For instance:, "NBA GOODS", is a link to a NBA store. The text NBA Goods is the anchor text that points to the link of the NBA store. Search engines are favorable to anchor text because it can provide some sense or relevancy to your link and gives your link some importance because someone took time out to write text for your links.

A link services that I recommend for people to try is at submission.hiifii.com. This is not an affiliate link nor do I receive commissions for referring them but through reviewing their website I think they're a new service on the up and coming. One thing that impresses me about their service is that they have a list of all the directories they submit to with a Google page ranking value for each. In addition to, they don't submit to all the directories within one day or 24 hours like some services but actually submits them manually, which gives about a week or two for your submission to be completed. They also allow I believe up to 5 different anchor texts for rotation. Directory submitting is good and recommended so you wont have to worry about any ill effects to your link popularity.

Building links is needed for any website owner and is one of the methods SEO firms utilize, so as you see, receiving great traffic is not easy but yet if you persist eventually you will reap the rewards

This article is provided by S-Proprietor.com, The Entrepreneurs Online Blog. If you are interested in more articles and information please visit our site at http://www.s-proprietor.com

Link Farming Techniques

Lets first get the basic terms cleared first, just in case you are newbie, unfamiliar with them.

Link farming is methodology which comes under SEO.

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, it is a web technology which is used to get high rankings in search engines for targeted queries.

Link Farming is a term, used as collective reference for methods used to get inbound links to your website and its inner pages.

Inbound links can be define simply as the hyper-links present on other website pages other than your own which point to your website.

Now before we start learning how to make them, first of all we must make sure we know why these link matters, there are 2 reasons behind -

1. At the base, greater the number of links to your website from outside, greater will be the no. of places where people can click to enter your website. Hence more traffic and in end more money. These links act as an gateway for your websites and more they are, the better.

2. But greater use of inbound links importantly is that greater the number of links more will be your search engine ranking (SER), because search engine see them as metric to judge your website quality. Why? At core they have a thinking that, more are the links to your website, more search engines thinks that people are finding your website useful and in turn discussing about it by placing links back to your website. They are bots, in the end? It is very difficult for them to differentiate between links placed deliberately by you or genuinely by others, for now at least. But it is recommended the ratio between two should be kept equal, so it does not look like you are fabricating all your links. Weight age from each link is also different and depends upon several factors, but we will not be talking about it here.

There are billions of websites out there, like stars in the galaxy, with potential, which can be used to link back to your site. You just need to know where to look for them and how to use them when you find them and this is what we are going to learn here.

Now lets take a look at basic link farming techniques one at a time, each of the method has to done in a peculiar way, to bring out maximum results. But, unfortunately due to lack of space here, we will be discussing them only in general only because I can possibly write tons of pages about each of them. We will be discussing them only in brief here, description will just try to answer what they are?

1. Website/Blog Comments - You can give a genuine comment on a website or blog content, and most them allow you to give your URL, back to your website.

2. Forum Signature - Many forums allow members to leave HTML signatures, which can form valuable back link for each post you do.

3. Social Bookmarking - Get your website marked in social bookmarking sites, can give you both traffic and back links.

4. Website Directory Submission - There are tons of web directory website where you can submit your website and get back links and traffic.

5. Guest Books - You can leave genuine comments in people's guest book with your back link.

6. Article Submission - You can submit articles in article directory website, just like this one, with a valuable back link.

7. Affiliate - If you create a product and allow affiliate sales from it. The people out their will review your product and in turn will give you back links, trying to sell it.

8. Press Release - You can release news articles for press, which press release website will pick up with back link.

9. Free ebooks/Reports - You can create redistributable ebooks or reports with valuable back links embedded in it.

10. Requesting Link via Email - You can ask for reciprocal links or mutual link exchange with relevant webmasters by personally contacting them, specially using email.

11. Video Link - You can upload video on video sharing site such as you tube with back link in description.

12. Software Submission Website - You can submit your software in software submission websites and get back link.

13. Script Submission - You can submit scripts in programming languages such as PHP, CGI, etc. in their respective websites and get back link.

14. CSS/Templates Submission - You can submit templates and CSS websites and get valuable back links.

15. Design Work Submission - You can submit your art work in form of wallpapers, flash content, icons, etc. in the respective websites and get back links in credit section.

16. Social Networking - You can add links to your website in your social networking profiles and community profiles.

Final Words - Though they are many software which claim do this work for you automatically, it is best done manually. Also the effort you put in your link farming should equally match with efforts on building a quality website, unless then you will not really feel any powerful gains. Also you should make genuine efforts in link farming and its effectiveness will be dependent upon your hard work.

Anuj Pathania is a computer professional who deals especially in web technologies. He is co founder of several successful companies. He is a very enthusiastic supporter of free knowledge as well as open source methodology. He is a passionate blogger and web author. He constantly write and update his web technologies blog with new innovative content.

Anuj Pathania - EzineArticles Expert Author

Friday, August 15, 2008

Increasing Web Traffic

The ultimate goal of most website owners is to increase traffic on their sites. The increase in traffic not only indicates an increase in the popularity of your website but simultaneously boosts the profit for those who sites and profit earning. While an increase in traffic is great for those whose sites are equipped to handle such intense traffic, sometimes this traffic is unwelcome. Many sites have actually been forced to temporarily shut down due to an overload in the volume of Internet users accessing the site. Basically these sites have exceeded the monthly leased bandwidth via all the hits they've received recently. More often then not though a hike in traffic is certainly welcome.

Essentially increasing the number of people that frequent your website can be a reasonably simple task. Purchasing advertising like pop-up ads, in-page ads and bulk email, can certainly help your site expand via the increase in traffic. For those wishing to increase the amount of traffic without having to pay anything for advertisements, there are alternatives. Simply by allowing your site to be placed in search engines you can greatly augment the volume of Internet users that visit your site. This is a little tricky however, as you may or may not notice a dramatic boost in the volume of hits depending on your placement in the search engine's output. Most people do not search past the first page of the engine's output and as such having your website appear in subsequent pages may lessen your chances for hits considerably.

Along with the abovementioned methods of amplifying the volume of web traffic on your site you can also build link popularity, that is, increase the number of links to your site. To do this you can contact similar sites via email and ask them to link to your website

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