| Link popularity is a very important part
for your search engine rankings. |
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| The link popularity greatly influences
the way that search engines rank your website. Google
for example has something called a Page rank which they
assign to each website and to each individual web page.
The page rank in turn affects the position that your website
will rank in the search engine results for any particular
keyword or key phrase. |
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Link popularity is
normally used as a term that describes the number of
links as well as the quality of links that lead to your
website from quality websites that relevant to your
site content wise. Although Google has recently start
placing less importance on inbound links due to link
farms and paid link networks, inbound links are still
considered to be of the upmost importance for search
engines when ranking a website and its link popularity. |
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The search engines
view an inbound link as some form of testimonial which
shows that a specific website has some form of quality
content worth linking to. In recent times we have seen
the strong growth of blogs and blog networks. Due to
the strong habit of bloggers to link to one and other,
many blogs have been able to reach very good rankings. |
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The webmasters of
e-commerce sites quickly saw the trend and jumped on
the band wagon so as to increase their link popularity.
Unfortunately due the large number of webmasters and
marketers having abused blogs by link spamming them,
the search engines are now frequently skeptical when
it comes to inbound links from blogs. |
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For those of you
that are new to the Page rank system, the easiest way
to check the page rank for any website is by downloading
the Google toolbar for either Internet Explorer or for
Firefox. After installing either one, you will be able
to see a small box in your browser which indicates the
Google Page rank for any website that you visit. |
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| Step 1 - Finding relevant and highly ranked
websites |
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The best way for
raising your link popularity is by getting an inbound
link from a website which is ranked well and has content
that is relevant to your website or that complements
it somehow. I advice all my readers to stay well clear
from link exchanges, networks and link farms. History
shows us that the search engines find out about this
in the end (especially Google) and this can lead to
dramatic actions from their side. The punishment can
include even deletion of your website from their search
engine and will ruin your link popularity. |
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Once your website
is banned from one of the major search engines it can
be a very long process to get re-included. It does happen
frequently that a website is not allowed to be re-included
in the search engine which is a nightmare for any website
as it seriously reduces the potential traffic volume
that a website could attract. |
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This might be a good
time to warn you about shady search engine optimization
firms with a bulk of them coming from India. These search
engine optimization firms promise top 10 Google and
Yahoo rankings and lots of other promises which seem
to be good to be true. These firms often use black hat
SEO tricks to increase the ranking of their client's
websites. The problem is that they will not give you
the top 10 ranking most likely and secondly once the
search engine finds out, you will be more than likely
deleted from the search engine results. |
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| Frequently if you ask these firms about
this they will tell you that everything they do is completely
legal and that they will do miracles for your link popularity. |
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Those words won't
help you very much though once they have done their
damage and managed to get you delisted from the search
engines. You won't hear back from them once that occurs
and all your efforts in regards to link popularity will
have been a waste of time. |
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| Just work on your link popularity yourself
and start slowly. Search for sites which clearly are sites
with similar content and high page rank or look for sites
that are affiliated with government websites or educational
websites as the search engines seem to hold those links
in the highest regards. |
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| 2) Requesting an inbound link |
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| Obviously the other site their webmaster
needs to be made aware of your site so that they can consider
linking to your website. |
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The easiest way to
do this and hopefully improve your link popularity is
through sending an email to the webmaster or website
owner with a request for a link. |
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| It's very important to customize each
email and for the email not look like a generic email
as people really hate that. You will find that the positive
reply percentage is much higher this way compared to some
standard email which you send out. |
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We have created a
few tips for creating this link request email which
should lead to higher link popularity. |
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Try obtaining the
email address of the relevant person rather than sending
it to info@example.com as your email might end up in
the spam or delete box. |
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Be careful what you
write in the email and the subject title as certain
words link exchange might trigger a spam filter or possibly
takes away the interest of the recipient to read the
email. |
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Be straight forward
on what you are asking for from the other person and
try to list some positive reasons on why the link would
be beneficial to both parties. |
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Try to include some
personalized items in the email which shows that you
have read through their website and that you really
are interested in dealing with them. This will certainly
lead to an increase in link popularity in the long run. |
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It's more than normal
that you will be required to give a link back. If you
are the one initiating the contact then you should place
a link on your site which links to their site first.
This will show a sign of trust and will most likely
lead to a backlink to your site. |
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If however they do
not reply after some time you should remove the link
to their site as it will have no benefit to your link
popularity efforts. |
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