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Link popularity is the number of links pointing to a website. It is an important factor that major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN use to rank web pages.

Webmasters figure out that in order for their web pages to rank well at the search engines for certain keywords, they need a lot of incoming links with these targeted key words. Linking schemes of all kinds were hatched...mini-sites, site networks, link farms and reciprocal linking, just to mention a few. Some schemes like link farms were clear indication of manipulating the search engines.

Google has clamped down on such practices and further fine-tuned its SERP algorithm to stop manipulation by anyone as evidenced by 'Jagger'.

Focus on the long term. Build a site that is credible to the search engines and your website visitors.

Here are 7 ethical link-building strategies for you work with...

1. Internal linking. Having a well organized internal linking structure insures that your website gets 'spidered' and that all pages of your website gets indexed by the search engines. This in turn increases the chances of the number of phrases that your website has the potential to rank for. And I have had website traffic from key phrases that I never thought of.

2. One-way links. Human edited directories look like a thing of the past. With Google being more efficient and accurate as ever there's no need to turn to human edited directories. A directory may get you a few click-throughs in a month or none at all. However, to be listed in a high quality directory like DMOZ and Yahoo can increase your PageRank.

The way to get inbound links is distribute content. There are many article directories on the Internet. Just include a link in your article. With article distribution you can choose the exact anchor text for the link.

3. Reciprocal links. What is reciprocal linking? It is simply trading links with other sites. You add their links to your site and vice versa. In times past website owners have sizeable directories with multiple links that are not relevant to theirs. Now, search engines have become wiser and look for link relevance. A word of advice here, know whom you are trading link with. Don't just choose any Tom, Dick, Harry or toothless Jane to be your link partners.

People have asked whether they would be penalized by the search engines for reciprocal links. Well, at least for now, they are still acceptable.

4. Varied the Text of your inbound links. It will not appear natural to the search engines for every site that links to you to have the same link description. So vary the text of your inbound links using a few key phrases.

5. Grow your links at a steady rate. Google penalizes new sites with low-traffic that grow their links too quickly, whereas a well-established high traffic site that increases by a few thousand links a month will viewed as normal. The rate at which links are created without being penalized by Google, is directly proportional to the age of the website. For owners of new sites, bear this in mind, if you are thinking about buying inbound links.

6. Have inbound links from different ranking sites.If all your inbound links are Pr6 and Pr7 sites, then you will send a strong indication that you have purchased those links. Your inbound links will not appear natural to the search engines. It is more natural for you to have a large number of Pr1 and Pr2 inbound links with decreasing number of inbound links as you move higher up the PageRank scale.

7. Actively participate in forums or blogs. Don't just post threads indiscriminately on forums. Search engines view this as spamming. Participate in forums to learn and to contribute to the communities and at the same time gather inbound links. You will also build credibility for yourself and your business if you are a solution to people's problems.

Blogging is an effective way of gathering inbound links. If you have a personal blog, it is easier to post comments at other sites. But do spam blast your comments with advertisements. Just provide a link to your site with your comments. Your goals are to gather inbound links and to gain a good reputation online. Comment intelligently on the specific subject. A well thought out comment will not only attract the search engines, but also more readers of the blog to your website. They will naturally link to you if they find articles of good quality at your website.

To achieve good rankings at the Search Engine through link popularity requires time and patience. Stick to the sound practices of link building. Impatience could cause you to incur penalties. It was once rumored, but now quite evident that Google uses a 'sandbox' to keep questionable sites in the hold until they have aged to a point. Then they are released at the sole discretion of Google. Other search engines also have their own safeguards to keep their SERPs from being cluttered with questionable sites.

The underlying principle is to grow your links 'organically' whilst adding content of value to your website. Ethical SEO is not a black art. It is a matter of adhering to the guidelines, terms and conditions stipulated by the search engines.

Gerrick W
mailto:gw@1stinternetmarketingsolution.com
Information and software tools you need to effectively market your online business.

Visit:http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com

First, I do not presume to know your exact business, but I am going to share with you a strategy I use in my business and I encourage you to adapt it to work within the limitations and differences of your business.

So, here is a great way that you can build lots of people linking back to your website: bribe them. Now, before I get bashed for contradicting myself by many people who may have read my other article on how paying for links to your website is like paying for sex, I want to admit that it may seem similar.

However, I do justify it in my own mind a bit differently. Maybe you see it the same way I do. Maybe you don't and maybe you do want to throw stones for the contradictory advice.

Here is one thing that I do... I encourage people to link to my website and when they do, I track the number of people that come to me from their link and I reward them with points they can redeem for additional content, audio downloads, courses and other things of that nature. It is more like an affiliate program that doesn't pay cash than it is buying links if you want to look at it that way.

However, there are some variations that you might consider to make it work for your business. If someone were to link back to your website, perhaps you'd want to send them, completely unsolicited, a thank you letter in the US Mail (e-mail is cheap and thought of as cheap, take the time to mail a thank you letter and it is memorable). If they add another link, maybe give them a gift card to have a cup of coffee on your. Use your imagination, but is a link worth a $5 gift card? A link from most websites, I'd say yes.

James Orr is a professional real estate investor and marketing expert.

He runs over 300 websites including a marketing blog about holding your marketing ruthlessly accountable to results at http://RuthlessAccountability.com

What I'm about to say may hurt your feelings, but it's time someone tells you the truth:

The majority of what you have learned about search engine optimization and link building from so-called gurus has been a LIE.

I am here to tell you, it is time to set the record straight...

If you hear another "SEO Expert" say ANY of the following... RUN!

• "Our special software will get you top 10 search engine rankings on Google & Yahoo!"
• "We need to submit your site every week or you will fall out of the search engines"
• "Trust us, We have a special relationship with the major search engines"
• "We will submit your site to 500,000 search engines for only $9.95"
• "We can Guarantee you a #1 spot in the major search engines"
• "Your site is Flash, it will never rank!"
• "See... My site ranks well... I know what I am doing..."
• "You need our special G-Spot Booster to get indexed in Google"
• "You need a high PageRank to rank well..."
• "SEO is like rocket science..."
• "Once your site ranks well, you don't need to do anything else"
• "You just need us to optimize your Meta Tags and that is it..."
• "All you need to use is the special PIPE | key in your page title..."
• "We got a copy of Google's algorithm from an Ex-Google Engineer"

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• "Our special software will get you top 10 search engine rankings on Google & Yahoo!"
• "We need to submit your site every week or you will fall out of the search engines"
• "Trust us, We have a special relationship with the major search engines"
• "We will submit your site to 500,000 search engines for only $9.95"
• "We can Guarantee you a #1 spot in the major search engines"
• "Your site is Flash, it will never rank!"
• "See... My site ranks well... I know what I am doing..."
• "You need our special G-Spot Booster to get indexed in Google"
• "You need a high PageRank to rank well..."
• "SEO is like rocket science..."
• "Once your site ranks well, you don't need to do anything else"
• "You just need us to optimize your Meta Tags and that is it..."
• "All you need to use is the special PIPE | key in your page title..."
• "We got a copy of Google's algorithm from an Ex-Google Engineer"

I could go on and on about what innocent prospects hear when inquiring about how they can get more traffic to their site by ranking better in the search engines... BUT I Won't... The majority of what is said about "how to rank" is just not true... For example, the majority of site owners today still think that adding keywords to their Meta Tags will actually help their search engine rankings! Maybe, you have been told this also... The truth is that, while potentially useful to describe your page contents to a search engine, they have no appreciable effect on actual search engine rankings. There is so much bad information being taught today regarding "search" you really have to be careful who you follow. Okay... Brett... So how do I get my site to rank well?

First off... You need to know that each of the major search engines have their own ranking algorithm and there could be more than 300 factors that are evaluated but lets make this simple for you to understand.

There are about four main factors that are important today, but in this article I only have time to cover one of them.

The Four Major Factors Are:
1. On-Page Optimization (page's title, text, internal linking, topical theme, prominence & proximity, etc.)
2. Off-Page Optimization (incoming anchor text, incoming document/link theme/relevancy, etc.)
3. Trust (domain age, historical data, topical theme, trust score relevance)
4. Filtering (growth profile, duplicate content, spam detection, LSA, registrar/DNS/IP, etc.)

Now that you have a brief overview of the major ranking factors, let's focus on an Off-Page Optimization ranking factor:

Link Building/Link Popularity
Did you know that when quality, relevant sites link to a page on your site you may be able to see an increase in your search engine rankings?

In fact... Google publicly answers the question that so many people have on their mind:

Question: How can I improve my site's ranking?

Answer: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34432

If you want to see how powerful links are go to Google and do a search for "click here". What site is at the top of the search engine results and why? The top site is the download page for Adobe Acrobat Reader because so many sites linked to this page with the text of "click here" or something similar.

Want another example? Do another search but use "miserable failure" this time. Why is the President's biography ranking for the term "miserable failure"? Thousands of bloggers and site owners created links to this page to make a political statement. Google does its best to preserve the integrity of its search engine and does not alter results like this.

New filters have been added to keep manipulation of search engine rankings to a minimum and this is why relevancy and links from quality authority sites is so important today.

So now that you understand how important incoming one-way links are what you need to do is begin focusing on getting high-quality/topically relevant sites to link in to your site's relevant pages!

Keep in mind that the off-page factor link building is just one of the major ranking factors the search engines evaluate today. Use this information to help announce your site to the world!

This article was written by: Brett Smith, who has over 15 years of Internet experience and currently owns and operates World Wide Internet Publishing Ltd. a custom Web development company providing high-end Internet marketing and Web site hosting & design services.

Brett is a sought-after Internet consultant and the "go-to" SEO Expert for many successful online businesses. For more information, visit http://www.WWIP.com and sign up for his Internet marketing tips newsletter right now.

Lately, there have been a lot of heated discussions regarding link building. Is it ethical to create a link building campaign? Does Google or any other search engine penalize for link farms (a bunch of non-related links created for the SOLE purpose of increasing search engine ratings)? Is the link building era over?

Link Farms

Many webmasters claim that Google penalizes websites for link farms. If this is so, why are a link farm sites that have a page rank of 5 on their link farm page? Let me give you an example, go to Google.com, type in any popular keyword(s) and append the word links to it. For example, ABCD Links. Notice youll get tones of websites that are linking to unrelated sites, but still have a great PR. I do not encourage link farming in any way or form, but building valuable partnerships is something I do encourage. If youre a jewelry site and youre exchanging links with an antiques site, I think this is a great thing. Its very possible that someone searching for jewelry may have an interest in antiques. I own a few sites and the hits I receive from partially related sites are phenomenal. Most of my websites are targeted towards webmasters so I receive hits from all sorts of sites. Remember, many webmasters claim to know the truth regarding search engine algorithms, but no one knows the EXACT TRUTH except the programmers at the search engines. Webmasters may have been penalized in the past for link farms and doorway pages (pages created around certain keywords for the sole purpose of redirecting surfers to the main page), but whos to say why some HAVENT been penalized.

Who Should I Create Link Partnerships With?

1. Create link partnerships with sites related to your site.

2. Create link partnerships with sites that have an audience that may be interested in your products

3. Exchange homepage links with websites that fit in your genre. Youll receive a link on a page with a good ranking and youll get quality, targeted hits.

How Do You Find Link Partners?

1. Signup with an automated links management provider that organizes your links and helps find link partners. Automated tools are the best because they help you save time. Uploading and downloading your pages for every link exchange can be a huge pain and very time consuming. Automated tools are NOT link farms because they give you complete control of who you exchange links with. If a member exchanges links with every website, he/she might be abusing the tool. If a member uses the tool responsibly, it can be very effective.

2. This is a great little exercise I would recommend to anyone.

a. Write down 20 search terms pertaining to your website

b. Go to http://www.google.com and type in a search term written in step A

c. Contact as many websites as possible listed under that search term and ask them to exchange inner page or homepage links with you. If they're NOT interested, ask whether they would be interested in selling advertising space. If your website is fairly new, you may want to ask sites for advertising prices. Free hits are the best hits but sometimes you might have to go the extra lap and pay for service. I wouldn't recommend spending over $100 / month for advertising UNLESS it's a high traffic site with your site audience. The best deals are the ones that offer $10-25 / month. There are sites out there that will sell SUPER cheap advertising, and others that charge an arm and a leg.

EVERYONE gets rejected sometime or another so keep your head up and keep moving along! The internet is comprised of Billions of websites. If you're rejected 500 times, you still have MANY business opportunities left! This is a continuous job so set aside time every week to do this. If you dont have time for this, then you dont have time to make money.

3. Hire a link building firm (this can be quite expensive but if you have money, its minimal work for you)

PageRank

Pagerank is a great tool but dont use it as your ONLY measurement for success. I cant explain everything about pagerank but a good explanation is given at http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html.

Conclusion

In conclusion, link building is not only for increasing link partners and search engine rankings, its also used to create partnerships and establish profitable relationships with other webmasters. Link building is a tedious process, but one of the best for getting free (sometimes not), targeted hits from other websites.

Vik Tailor is the owner of http://www.linkexchanged.com and http://www.buyadvertisingonline.com. He has been in the online advertising industry for over 4-5 years and has extensive online marketing knowledge.

Over the last year or two Google has exploded with new features for webmasters who utilize its services. But with all the changes, what impact is it having on the webmasters who rely on having their sites show up in Google searches?

Lets say you build a website surrounding a particular product or service and have a targeted audience segment for online buyers. Youve done your homework and found that the competition is moderate at best. After some well planned SEO work and a little marketing you are all set to see how your site is positioned on Google. Take into consideration that you are not ready to spend a lot of money on adWords until you see some results from your SEO work.

Ok, heres the kickeryour website doesnt even exist on Google for weeks or maybe even months. Have all the changes to Google's infrastructure hindered the ambition or motivation of webmasters? Or, has it given new respect to patience and planning? With new tools such as Google Documents and Spreadsheets, Maps, Video, Checkout, and webmaster tools such as Base, Sitemaps, and Analytics, web surfers have all kinds of tools available to make the web a more interesting and productive place.

Many webmasters already know that getting listed in Open Directories is beneficial. But while youre waiting on Google to index and crawl your website, you might as well go ahead and list your web URL with DMOZ. DMOZ is slowly becoming a trouble spot with those interested in getting their site listed. There are documented articles of people who have waited over 2 years to get their websites listed on DMOZ. Are they that busy? Should they hire more editors, or just more efficient ones? If this directory takes so long to get into, and is a prime source for all major search engines, what are we to think? Are webmasters losing out because of the delay? Is it still as valuable as it once was? Many webmasters who frequent SEO forums are speaking up and stating that its not worth the wait anymore. Will this be a wake-up call to DMOZ? Lets hope. Its time to make a decision and get things going.

Case in point, I own a website which has been in existence for 5 months. It has been properly built following standardized SEO practices. Oddly enough, it appears on Google, Yahoo and MSN when searching for "portal deployment", but has yet to get listed in DMOZ. It has been submitted weeks ago, but knowing the turn-around time, it may not get listed for months or close to a year from now. Let me remind you that the SEO practices followed were "organic", no fancy or expensive outsourcing took place. So why the listing difference? Google noticed the site and has even picked up the changes to the which happened weeks ago.

We all know the internet is growing at an exponential rate, hundreds of thousands of new domain names are registered each week, but shouldnt companies like DMOZ be more prepared to react to the growth? If youve followed the steps for successful SEO and havent seen the result, be patient. I do believe the DMOZ will snap to attention after more and more people complain about the long delay for getting their URL listed. If you have feedback on how to expedite the process of having your website crawled or listed on DMOZ let me know. Then share it with everyone else.

Tim Cambier has over 10 years of IT experience and has led the implementation of both open-source and packaged web portal deployements (http://www.webportal101.com). His experience migrating and managing intranets allows him to relate, and offer advice, on how to get things done.

He has published articles on web analytics (http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/cambier_disc.html) and creating your search engine (http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/21909) as well as developed and sold his own internet start-up company. He is currently working to establish a website dedicated for web portal deployments and intranet redesigns.

Link popularity is very important these days for all websites since most
major search engines look at link popularity has a tool for ranking your site in there search results as well as the quality of your websites content keyword wise. Link popularity is a great way to gaining targeted visitors to your website. This article is going to show you easy and free and effective ways to increase your websites link popularity.

The purpose of having a website is to get visitors to your website to enable
you to reach you websites goal that maybe to make a sale of your product or
service.

here are a couple of free and effective ways to increase your websites link
popularity and the best thing it is free.

1) Submit your website to directories - Directories are by far the
most popular way to increase any websites link popularity since they are so many
directories out there and they are usually free for any webmaster to add there
website url. You need to find directories that pass Google page rank and that
are search engine friendly you can find this out usually by looking at links
that are on the directory that have direct links websites not a redirecting url.
A example of such directory is mine Sorve.com Directory

Directories are also great for gaining highly targeted visitors to your
website if you submit your site in the right category since people actually
search directories to find relevant websites to what they are searching for.

2) Forum Signatures - This is another method you gaining link
popularity this can be dine by link to your website from your signature in the
forum. Make sure you hyperlink your website to the main keyword's that your
website relates to e.g. Search Engine
Directory

3) Link Exchanges - This is another popular way to increase any
websites link popularity by exchanging website links with relevant websites to
yours this is a hard way to gain link popularity but it has been made easy to
exchange links with sites by link exchange sites such as linkexchanged.com or
linkmarket.net but you can also ask website owners to link with your site by
just emailing the webmaster in most cases they will like to link with you if you
have a there link already on your link exchange page and if they find your
website useful to there viewers.

4) Writing Articles - writing articles that enable other website
owners to publish them o there website is another way to gain link popularity
like what I have done. This you will have a Authors biography or resource box on
the bottom of your article that contains your websites link so when someone
publishes your article on your website you will gain a nice one-way link to your
website and also if your readers find your article interesting they are most
likely going to checkout your website.

5) Link To Us - provide a page on your website for people that find
your website interesting to add your website link to your website here is a
example http://www.sorve.com/link.html (Link To Us).

6) Just Ask - Ask anyone that owns a website you know just to add you
link or add just add a couple of lines to your website such as: "Please help us
by add our link to your site" Hyperlink it to your link to us page or link
exchange page.

These are most probably most common ways for you to increase your website
link popularity and gain more visitors from those links or from search engines.
So start gaining links to your website and get the traffic that you deserve.

Good Luck

Martin has been making a living with affiliate revenue for the past couple of years you can by joining Martin's Webmasters Newsletter for free.

Add your website links for free to Sorve.com Directory and also Search Engine Directory