How To Improve Your Search Ranking ?

Importance to have reciprocal links: One of the ways to improve your search ranking is to link from us to your own website then link back from your site to us. This is called having reciprocal links. We provide this service at no charge to all of our customers. All you need to do is to login to your member account then select Add Link from the left navigation then follow the prompts.

The more websites that link to your particular website the more visitors your website will receive. Especially if many of the actual websites linking to your website are in a complementary business, this then would not only increases the number of visitors to your website but many of these visitors would also be highly interested in your companies products and services. Reciprocal links are links you exchange with other website owners so that you both may benefit, by adopting a suitable reciprocal linking policy it is possible to build up hundreds and hundreds of quality websites all linking back to your website as you link to theirs.

Link Popularity by Jim Pretin

Google is by far the most important search engine on the net. To rise to the top of their search engine, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how they measure your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top, you will likely rise to the top of all the other search engines as well).

Link Popularity

Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

Quality not Quantity

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers vitamins, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another vitamin site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. They use a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.

One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.

Relevancy is important

The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.

Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewellery, and another jewellery website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewellery is being written or discussed.

Don't forget Anchor Text

Also, they give an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.

Keyword variety counts

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.

It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a well defined link to your site.

About the Author

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.

P.S. Article published with kind permission to OAVS by the author Jim Pretin.on May 2007

Article Submission Sites

Article submission sites are websites that act as 'article banks'. They allow authors of articles to post their articles on the site for free, and they allow webmasters who need content to copy those articles for free (in exchange for a link to the author's website).

Article Distribution Lists

Article distribution lists serve a similar function to article submission sites - they just operate differently. Instead of visiting the site and posting your article, you simply email your article to the group, and all members automatically receive it (assuming they're subscribed to received emails). Most article distribution groups are Yahoo groups.

This list is not ordered by popularity; it is alphabetized.

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