8 Link Popularity Methods Ranked For SEO

By John Metzler

The name of the game in the new year is White Hat SEO. Search engines are too smart for quick-fix, questionable methods any longer. Building a quality link network for your web site is one of the most important aspects to web site promotion, whether it's for search engine optimization, affiliate programs, lead generation, or otherwise. Surprisingly, some people are still involved in methods that have been proven useless and even harmful for several years. One method that seems to stand the test of time is a link exchange: a simple, yet effective, way to increase your web site's link popularity. This is by far the most common method of acquiring incoming links.

The effectiveness of link exchanges has been discussed ad nauseam by the SEO community over the past few years. The major Google update dubbed "Florida" showed clearly that many link exchanges were starting to carry less weight than they had previously carried. Doing hundreds of link exchanges with casino, pharmaceutical, and loan consolidation sites, no longer produced top rankings on Google. Yahoo! has followed suit to some degree; however, MSN is still where Google and Yahoo! were several years ago.

Search engine comparisons aside, many people wonder if link exchanges are worth doing anymore. Are there more effective methods of obtaining quality incoming links? The truth is that it totally depends on your competition.

If the norm for obtaining backlinks in one market is to participate in forum discussion with linked signatures, and to swap links with unrelated sites, then simply doing a higher quantity of such basic tasks would put your site at the top of the rankings. If your site is in the field of search engine optimization, then more advanced methods of link development should be done. Such methods might include writing articles; getting paid directory listings at Yahoo!, bCentral, and Business.com; or investing in professional press release distribution.

It all depends on what your competitors are doing. Ignoring the quantity of SEO methods and focusing on the quality, a good ranking system for backlink acquisition methods is as follows, with #8 being the poorest and #1 being the best:

8. "Sign-up And Get 1000+ Links in 5 Minutes!"

Link opportunities of this nature are pure sp@m. In most cases, you will see a small form at the bottom of a links page, with a text field for your web site URL and one for your email address. Giving your email out to legit businesses is risky enough, but can you imagine how much junk mail you will receive if you start signing up to these kinds "opportunities"? This method is a complete waste of time.

7. Three-Way Linking:

If "Site A" refers to your web site, you may get link emails out of the blue offering a partnership whereby your site (Site A) links to the emailer's site "B", while his other site "C" links back to your Site A. This is one of the most abused linking schemes around today simply because Site C, the second of the mysterious stranger's sites, is usually nothing more than a farm of outbound links. Sure, some link popularity work has been done to obtain a decent PageRank value, but the value this site carries as an outbound link to yours is minimal at best.

The other downside to this is that search engines flag link networks once they see repetitive linking patterns between the same sites. If you allow your site to be linked up with these networks, it is not uncommon to see your site suffer a link popularity penalty and ranking drop.

6. Links from Forum Signatures:

These do not carry as much weight in terms of SEO as one might think. Yes, they are one-way links, and yes, they can be from pages that have content relevant to your site. But that doesn't mean much unless your links appear in a forum's thread that is popular enough to be linked to from static web pages, or the thread's URL doesn't contain many random characters (historically they have been harder for search engines to index). Most pages at a forum are only linked to from one other page: the main category of the topic. Getting links on pages with little to no link popularity themselves won't help your site much.

Some forums even use a 'nofollow' tag on outbound links as a means to curb link spammers. By all means, if you are a regular participant at forums, mention your site in your signature for the purpose of creating awareness and click-through's from forum readers, but not solely for link popularity purposes.

5. Links at the Bottom of Your Clients' Sites:

If your customers have websites, you might be able to ask them to link back to your site as part of a contract, or simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Most times these links appear next to the copyright line at the bottom of the home page. A one-way link is good, but unless your customers run the same kind of business as you do, their site content won't be relevant enough to make this a high quality link.

A word of caution to search engine optimizers: As I mentioned in my previous article, Google Webmaster Guidelines You May Be Overlooking, Google specifically mentions how they don't like SEO companies forcing their clients to link to them. Realistically this may be tough for Google to enforce, but going against any of their official guidelines is never recommended.

4. Buying Text Links:

Be very careful when buying links. It can be an effective way of obtaining one-way incoming links if you can avoid getting into trouble. The major search engines don't allow anyone to pay for organic listings (paid inclusion programs such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are separate). One could argue that due to the reliance on links for good rankings (acting as "votes" from one site to another), buying links essentially amounts to buying rankings.

Some web sites have been penalized and even banned entirely from the search index of major engines for using "black hat" link acquisition methods, including buying thousands of site-wide links in a short amount of time. If you plan on buying links, then keep a few points in mind:

i. Don't always use the same anchor text. If you buy a thousand links on the same domain, all using the exact same anchor text, it will appear unnatural to search engines.
ii. Your links should appear on pages with content relevant to your site's own content. This applies to all kinds of link acquisition methods.
iii. Buying thousands of links at once may send up red flags to search engines. At the very least, you will probably see a delay in those new links affecting your rankings, which can get expensive in the short-term.

3. Link Exchanges:

The Internet itself is nothing more than a network of links, and mutual linking is a big part of that. Outbound links on your site can hurt your link popularity if they are of low quality and/or unrelated to your site's content. Incoming links from low quality or unrelated sites are a waste of time unless you are just trying to get your site crawled by search engine spiders for the first time. When exchanging links, look at the PageRank value of the partner's home page, as well as the page your link will appear on; Make sure the page is indexed by the major search engines; Don't exchange with a page that has 100 or more outbound links on it; Make sure your link uses important keywords in its anchor text and is surrounded by relevant plain text. Link exchanges have the possibility to be a big part of your link campaign if potential partners meet a strict criteria for SEO.

2. Directory Submissions:

Directories can provide you with a one-way link on pages with highly relevant text. Some directories, like the Yahoo! Directory are weighted very heavily by other search engines. A link from these directories can be the most valuable link your site can receive. While there are thousands of free directories on the web today, paying for the more prestigious listings will go extremely far in not only increasing your link popularity, but also establishing a level of legitimacy with the major search engines. Junk and spammy web sites are a search engine's nightmare, but a search engine knows that basically all of these fly-by-night sites will never spend the $299 per year on a Yahoo! Directory listing.

1. Article Publication/Distribution:

Write a unique article on topic with your web site and create an author biography (or "resource box") that mentions your site and links back to it with relevant anchor text. Once you have finished writing your article, find a resource that reprints or publishes articles in your field and features them on their own pages that receive high PageRank values. Once the page your article appears on ages, your rankings will benefit. Hundreds of poor quality article reprint sites do nothing but harm the linking power of your unique content as well as waste your own time. Try to get your article featured on authoritative sites in your field instead.

Provided you write a well-formed and informative article, you might be surprised to see where it shows up months down the road. Bloggers and other web site owners in your field will want to offer your helpful information to their visitors as well. People who sign up to Google Alerts for keywords related to your field might also see a link to your article appear in their inbox.

Useful content is highly sought after on the Internet today. If you can provide others with unique and helpful writing, it will go a long way in increasing the exposure of your business or web site. As I mentioned above, what works best for your site will depend on your competition, budget, time and other factors. However, these eight link popularity methods should serve as a helpful guide for your SEO efforts.

An expert at organic SEO, John Metzler has held executive positions at SEO firms since 2001. He offers search engine marketing and PPC services through the SEO company SEOTampa.com.

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Role of SEO in Online Marketing

By William King

Online marketing, also known as Internet marketing, is simply the marketing of products and service offerings via the Internet. With the explosion of Internet onto the scene, almost every home is connected to your product or service through online marketing. You may have a great service or the perfect product and a fantastic website but that will not ensure visitors to your site. So it%u2019s important to get the Internet marketing right.

Online marketing comes in various forms -

Banner ads, email marketing, paid inclusions, pay per click, affiliate advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). The growth of online marketing has been fueled largely by the expansion of the Internet audience and the convenience a customer can be offered in terms of purchasing online. With the large audience out there, you will want to get as many visitors as possible to your site. This brings us into the realm of SEO, since this is becoming one of the main avenues for an online business to try to increase virtual footfalls to the site.

Lets first talk about SEO -

What is it? Put simply, it is the use of an algorithm to improve a sites search engine rankings or hits. This is done by an Internet marketer to try to improve the quantity as well as the quality of visitors to their website.

The concept of improved quality is also important here -

It is essential to direct the right traffic, people searching for the product or service that you offer or something similar, rather than simply a random selection of people looking for something else. Ideally, your SEO strategy should work with your target market in mind and work towards attracting this target market to the site. Relevance is key, since people looking for a web-hosted tax planning software will not buy wedding invitations, even if driven to the website and will be disappointed.

SEO is important because it covers most of the key areas that marketers need to address while selling and advertising online - it generates awareness, it leads to acquisition of customers and conversion of visitors to customers, and optimizes the marketing efforts to target buyers.

The value of increased, relevant traffic to the site will most likely guarantee increased sales. SEO marketing offers information about your product offering when the interest from visitors is high and, once directed to your site, the visitor can be converted to a buyer immediately. Most companies build out their online marketing strategies keeping SEO in mind. This is essential to the success of a marketing plan, since a good SEO plan can be supported by a pertinent emailing marketing campaign and other PR programs.

Thus, the role of SEO is so vital to a successful online marketing campaign that it can be considered a separate tactic in itself but it is best to make it a well-planned segment of an organized strategy. Consider this an inappropriately planned SEO may result in wasted resources, optimizing factors that do not link back to the correct target audience in the midst of a highly competitive and growing online marketplace. While many SEO experts and marketers may dispute the process to successful SEO (some say page linking, some keyword basics, others copywriting and so on), one thing most people agree on is constructing an SEO that is closely connected with your marketing strategy so that each supports the other.

William King is the director of UK Wholesalers Drop Shippers Distributors & Suppliers, Wholesalers Supplies & Drop Shipping Products Directory, and Drop Shippers & Wholesale Drop Shipping Products Directory. He has 18 years of experience in the marketing and trading industries and has been helping retailers and startups with their product sourcing, promotion, marketing and supply chain requirements.

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Search Engine Optimization - Using Related Words For Better Rankings

By Darell Mckissick

One of the best ways to get a jump on the competition when it comes to search engine rankings is to use related terms on your page. If your term is "growing flowers", you would be well advised to use words such as rose and carnation, or other types of flowers. Any word that readily associates itself with flowers will help.

But you can also take this one step further using what I call a Related Search Keyword list. I have found that no matter how good you do with the main targeted term, you will always get more traffic from related searches, and many things you never even thought of.

To build your related search keywords list, go to the Yahoo search marketing tool and type in your main keyphrase. You will get returned to you a list of related searches, sometimes even hundreds of variations.

Cut and paste the list and save it to your desktop for easy access. You would want to use at least the top 50 terms. If your topic is really popular, you may want to use the top 100 related searches.

Go through the list and write down every word that appears in the list. Not phrases, but individual words. If you use the top 50, you will probably come out with about 30 different words. As I stated in an earlier article, this list should be used as your keyword list for the META keyword tag.

You should include each of these words on every page. That means they need to appear somewhere in your template. I am sure you can find a place to include them. It can be a text link, in your slogan, or anywhere else they make sense.

By using the Related Search Keyword list, inserting the words into your META tag and on your template, you will be a step ahead of your competition in getting the related searches. And by combining that with the related words in your content you will be miles ahead.

Mastering the search engines does not take trickery or deceit. It takes a sound and thoughtful approach that considers both the search engine spider and the searchers. If you follow the tips above, the search engines will appreciate your clarification and the searchers will reward you by typing in those off the wall terms that bring most people to your site.

Darell's new site is a breath of fresh air in the internet marketing arena, focusing on getting the work done and setting realistic expectations. Visit it at

http://www.moneymakingmonkey.com

For more info on Search Engine Optimization

http://www.moneymakingmonkey.com/SEO

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Increasing Search Engine Rankings Through PR

By Joaquin Garcia

PR articles have always had an important role as part of the marketing communication and services mix. As a communication practitioner in the B2B field, I've personally been involved in preparing hundreds of these articles.

PR articles are extremely effective pieces, not only because of their pul,l but also because of the believability factor. Their use in an editorial environment makes them better believed than paid ads.

The editorial environment is encountered not only in the trade magazines, but in the web through E-zines.

Marketing communication practitioners, both consultants and clients alike, are well aware of the pull that that press release articles can achieve. But they may not be aware of what these articles can do in improving search engine rankings of their web sites.

This is done in two ways, first of all linking back to a website, through information on the press release article. Contact details of the article’s author should have the URL of the client’s website.

The other way is through the inclusion of keywords in the article. In the Web 2.0 world, placing keywords in client’s website Meta tags is not enough. The web robots of today search web content, on page, but also off page looking for keywords in the many news items found on the web.

With the enormous database management capabilities of today’s search engine, picking up these keywords is a much easier task than it was in the web’s early days (Web 1.0).

Hence, optimising links and use of keywords in PR articles help improve search engine rankings, because search engines list sites with the most backlinks and keywords in the top of each keyword listing.

Recognising that the Web 2.0 world paradigm may be a tad confusing for most communication practitioners, we, at JG Marketing Services, include SEO (search engine optimisation) considerations as part and parcel of the PR preparation services we offer.

Companies that prepare their own PR articles are well advised to keep the use of keywords in their articles. It's not a matter of repeating the keywords so that the articles tend to lose relevance, but to make sure that these are included in the text and, of course, the headline, as much as possible.

Web robots do their things and count the keywords and relate these back to backlinks contained in the article.

Looking at this, very simplistically, the more of these keywords, the better the rankings.

Definitely there's more to this than just making sure keywords are used. But, suffice it to say that marketing communication practitioners should be aware of the need to include these keywords.

Joaquin "Jack" Garcia is CEO of JG Marketing Services, a specialist business-to-business advertising agency founded in 1980. Following the no-nonsense approach to advertising and marketing communication, he presents articles on these topics which Joaquin is passionate about. Jack's website can be accessed at: http://www.jgmarketing.com.au/JG/

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SEO Copywriting for High Search Engine Rankings

By Parker Hannah

Content is the key – . But what does it all mean! What is content and what is SEO content! How can you use content for website promotion or high search engine rankings!

Why content is said to be the KEY!

Web crawlers or spiders are the means by which the search engines find out what your website is about. These crawlers read the text on a webpage, and index every word in the search engines database. So there you have it, in the simplest context, if you serve content based pages to these crawlers, the higher the possibility in them understanding what your site is actually about.

Why, after serving good content is my site is not ranking well in the search engine result pages!

All the major search engines have their own algorithms to justify the relevancy and trustworthiness of a webpage in respect to specific search terms. And this determines high search engine rankings of your websites.

Now, here comes seo copywriting. It is commonly defined as writing search engine friendly content in your website, giving proper positioning and emphasis on specific keywords or phrases.

Although seo copywriting is not the only criteria for high search engine rankings but it is undoubtedly one of the primary conditions. An expert would say here that ‘every little bit counts’.

SEO web content writing suggestions (not rules):

1) Targeting up to three key phrases per page
Include two to three keyphrases per page. If your keyphrases are similar or are variations of a primary keyphrase this should enable to you effectively write content as you have plenty to “play with”. 2) At least 300 words per page
You will find a lot of image based websites doing just fine, even without content. The reason may be that they have high level of off page support. In other cases at least 300 words of content is recommended to establish your point and maintain keyword density and proper search engine optimisation.

3) Using key phrases in headings and sub headings and H1 tags
Major search engines like Google, put a lot of emphasis on this to determine the subject of the topics in your site. Using relevant key phrases will take you a step further in search engine optimisation.

4) Using key phrases at least twice inside a paragraph (targeting the beginning and / or the end is better)
It is necessary and simply establishes the relevance of the heading and subheadings as well as helping maintain keyword density.

5) Break key phrases and use them inside the paragraph – in such cases, try to put the pieces, in an order similar to the original phrase.
It’s a tested and fruitful idea. However restrain yourself from overdoing it or it may not be reader friendly.

6) Using key phrases for anchor text or links
This is recommended to gain maximum value for the directed page.

7) Update update update.
Keep your pages updated and start writing a blog on the same subject your site relates to. Use all the other trial and error processes and find out what works for your site.

Lastly, don’t forget to put the same kind of emphasis on the other off page website promotion such as link building, affiliate marketing etc. It really is in incorporating a holistic approach to your website promotion that you gain your search engine rankings and untap your websites full potential.

Hannah Parker is a SEO Web Content Writer with years of experience. For more information on seo copywriting, search engine optimisation, high search engine rankings, website promotion, she recommends you to visit http://www.vertical-leap.com.au/

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