The Art of Link Popularity 101 part 1 & 2 and How to effectively increase your ranking with search engines

KlickonUSA.com Pay Per Click Advertising Webmasters Tip of the Week!

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We have received tons of request and questions from Webmasters that relate to Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising and Website promotion.  So we decided to take some of the most popular questions and answer them for those who visit our website and want to learn how to increase search engine ranking and quality traffic. 

Q:  How important are the quality of links that point to and from my website? Does this play a role in how I am ranked by search engines?

A:  The Art of Linking Popularity 101.  This question is so vast that we are going to break it down into a 2 or 3 part series.  However, the short answer is:  You can have thousands of pages linking to your site but if they do not contain or say the right things about your site or if the links are not related at all to the theme or subject of your site then those links may not help, in fact, they could very well be damaging to your ranking on the major search engines. 

Here is a likely scenario:  One month your site has very good rankings and because you failed to do your homework and subscribed to a link farm (big mistake) with the grand desires of obtaining a higher ranking on the popular search engines, the next month your website vanishes from Google or Yahoo without a trace.  Think it can't happen to you?  Just try linking up with a link farm or FFA (Free for All) network that has been banned by Google or Yahoo and when that friendly Googlebot spider comes along to index your website you may see fiction become fact.

For those newly appointed Webmasters a Link Farm can be classified as:

Pages which are designed for the sole purpose of gaining link popularity.  They are pages without any content. Pages mainly consisting of links. 

What happens is people signup and add their URL to a list which consist of hundreds of other website URLS. They then agree to upload those links or pages to their website. These innocent people are told that having more links pointing to your website will help you receive higher ranking.  What they don't tell you is that this practice is banned and illegal with most search engines.  Some of the more advanced Link Farms have really nice looking web pages, but the content and the purpose is the same "to TRY to trick the search engines into thinking that they have reciprocal links with other websites.  

This method of linking was effective in the past.  However, search engines today have become wiser to the tricks of the trade and will penalize sites that are linked by known Link Farms.  What does this mean.  (1) Your site may be banned from being listed and/or (2) the Link Farms links may not be included for the purpose of ranking your site.  These two reasons alone should discourage you from participating or associating your site with Link Farms.  If you have participated or have links associated with this type of service on your server I strongly suggest that you removed those pages from your site immediately.  If you have signed up with a Link Farm service then get your website's url removed from those site(s) immediately. Cleanup your site before it's too late.  This form of linking may very well be the reason why your website is not getting solid rankings with the major search engines.  Once your are banned from a major search engine it is extremely hard, no almost impossible to get your site back into their index.  Like most people, search engines figure if you used illegal activities in the past what will stop you from using illegal activities in the future?  It's not their vault that you didn't take the time to read their FAQ or submission policies regarding what is acceptable in terms of listing your site.

FFA or more commonly known on the internet "Free-For-All" ads. What this basically means is that your url (ad) is blasted to hundreds or thousands classifieds sites for "Free," or is it? Well, what commonly happens is that these FFA companies will list your ad for free in exchange that you give  them your email address. They then blast your email account with other websites who have elicit their services like you (hopefully not).  In a nutshell nobody really sees your ad because just like you they delete those silly emails or better yet send those knowing unwanted emails to a email provider that you don't even use for receiving your vital and important emails. If you are like most experience Web masters you have a free email account that you use to send email to that you don't want to clutter you main email server. 

Folks today it is not "He/She with the most links win." The realty of today with regards to search engine ranking is "He/She with the most relevant links wins."  What do I mean when I say that you ask?  The "Art of Linking" is in fact just that an art!  Not only is it important with who you are linking to and vice versa, but it is just as important to make sure your inbound links (meaning links coming from other sites) have titles and descriptions that best describes your keywords, terms or phrases.  I don't want to make light of the fact that getting a high ranking non-related website to add your link on their site isn't important, that is not the case.  Having a high ranking site will added value to helping your ranking, but having a lower or equal ranking site that shares the same type of web content as your site will have a greater impact when it comes to evaluating your links. 

3 Important Link Popularity Tips

Here are some important tips in gaining the upper hand on your competition and legal methods to increase your search engine ranking with link popularity:

1. Stay away from Link Farms and FFA's. Remove any association with these entities from your website, if they are present.
   

2. Take a look at your current links partners and see if their titles and descriptions of YOUR website best describes the keywords terms of phrases that you are using with the major search engines. If not, then I suggest that you:

A. Contact your link partners and kindly ask them to update your link and description with a description that you have developed that best describes your websites, it's benefits and features.  Email each of your Link Partner's Webmaster and have them update your links.  

B.  If you have a Link Directory like our website, where potential visitors visit your website for the purpose of linking to you then make sure that the link and it's description are updated as well.  Take the time and develop a good title and description because you don't want to keep having your link partners update their links often. Most serious Webmasters are extremely business doing "Webmaster task" like answering questions, adding new link resources, checking for broken links, or link errors, writing weekly newsletters, etc just to name a few.

3. Make sure that all of your links are functional links i.e. your website is free of dead links.  Visitors as well as search engine hate dead links.  How do you feel when you visit a site and it is clutter with dead links? Having dead links on your website let's the visitor know that (1) your information is outdated and (2) you are not maintaining an up to date site.  Just as the search engines index your site every month (hopefully more often then that) looking for new and fresh content, as a Webmaster one of your responsibilities should be each month is to ensure that the links that are featured on your site are functional and serve their purpose.

Now you've applied the first 3 tips and it's time to get core of link popularity with the aim of legally increasing your search engine ranking.  You've updated your links and descriptions. If necessary you've contracted your link partners and had them make the necessary corrections to your links.  You've done your "Spring Cleaning" of your site and either corrected or deleted any dead links. Remember, checking for dead links should be at minimum a monthly task for any serious Webmaster.  Your customers will appreciate visiting a website that has fresh and up to date content and search engines when indexing your site won't be reporting or trying to attempt to visit sites that are not operational.  One word of caution:

Just because a site is not functional when you attempt to access it does not make it a dead link.  You need to keep in mind that severs are down for many reasons such as maintenance, upgrades and hardware or software failure.  Do not delete a site simply because you can't access it at that moment.  Try to visit the site at a later time or day.  If it is still not functional then consider removing it.  The last thing that you want to do is remove a link partner because their server was down. 

In theory in order for you to gain a higher ranking on your competition you must: (1) have more valuable web content (2) have more relevant links pointing to your site then theirs and (3) have a website that is optimized in such a way that the theme, content, keywords, title, Meta tags, and descriptions are formatted properly.

Obviously, we are discussing item number two, which is "Having more relevant links pointing to your site then their competition."  I spend a great deal of time visiting and analyzing websites.  When I evaluate a website for inclusion in our Link Directory one of the things that I currently look for is what do other people and more importantly what do other search engines say about that site.  

This is probably a good place to end part one on Link popularity here.  Take some time and review the 3 important points that I have outline and make the necessary corrections.  

Return to 3 Important Tips.

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