If you’re a webmaster, you’ve probably spent almost as much time going after link exchanges as actually building your website. Gaining in-bound links, especially from websites with a higher PageRank than your own, can increase your own PageRank on Google, and help your site attain a better overall ranking in Google search results. Proposing link exchanges with other sites that have similar content to your own is a good idea, but the process can be terribly time consuming. So what else can you do?Most webmasters tend to underestimate the usefulness of online directories in propagating links to their website. No, I am not talking about FFA pages or the thousands of small directories only the website owners and perhaps two other people know about. I am talking about the big directories, such as The Open Directory Project (ODP or DMOZ), Yahoo, Zeal, and even Buzzle.
Getting a listing, or multiple listings, in these directories can bring direct traffic to your website. But perhaps most importantly, these directories act as a propagation source for other sites that are looking to place relevant links on their site. For example, someone who has website about tropical plants may want to place a variety of links to other sites with the same topic. Chances are good they will go to one (or more) of these directories, pick out some links, and place them on their links page. Now, if your website has something to do with tropical plants, and your site was listed in the directory and category they took links from, you might have received a free link from this other website without ever having asked for it. You would probably be surprised just how many new sites fill their fledgling link pages with websites listed on Yahoo, ODP, and other directories.
Furthermore, various popular search engines directly use one or more of these directories to populate their search results. For instance, Google is known to use, and look favorably upon, sites listed in ODP. In fact, Google’s so-called directory is populated almost entirely with ODP categories and websites. And because ODP data can be freely placed on any website or within any search engine, literally thousands of websites and search engines use their data. Free links galore!
There really aren’t many search engines that directly use the Yahoo directory, but that doesn’t devalue a Yahoo listing. A website listed in the Yahoo directory will benefit due to direct traffic from that listing, as well as the possibility of better placement in the Yahoo search results. Yahoo is the most used search engine behind Google, so good placement within their results is important. And as mentioned previously, many websites will “borrow” links from the Yahoo directory to place on their own site. There is no doubt that getting listed in the ODP and on Yahoo will lead to more links beyond the one or two you get in the directories.
Smaller directories, like Zeal and Buzzle are also worth submitting to for the same reasons. Zeal is a particularly good deal because site submission is free (once you are a Zeal member) and the links in the directory are used throughout the Looksmart Network, which includes the sites Looksmart.com, Wisenut.com, Findarticles.com, and more. Buzzle is an informative directory that contains useful articles as well as links. Getting listed within the Buzzle directory costs $59 (nonprofit sites are free), but it may be worth it considering you are getting a link from a good site with decent exposure.
There are many other high-quality directories you may want to consider. Good places to look for directories are, ironically, in the ODP and on Yahoo under the category Directories or Search Engines. Yahoo is especially helpful in that it lists the most popular directories first.
Bradley James is the Chief Editor at GoogleAdvisor.org. He has a computer science degree (BS) from Truman state University, and is currently working on his MS degree at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He is especially interested in search algorithms used by such search engines as Google and Yahoo.
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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Search engines are constantly tweaking their ranking algorithms and when that happens some pages lose their top ranking positions. One such event was the infamous Florida Update. Many pages were practically kicked-out of the top 1000 pages for competitive keywords.With recent updates, webmasters have been thinking that Google does not use PageRank because low PR pages can get very good rankings. Before that everyone was saying that PageRank was THE factor for top positions. Now, everyone is saying that keyword rich anchor text links from many different sites is the key for the top ranks.
All these recent events seem to indicate that search engine algorithms are totally unpredictable, right? Wrong!
All search engines are going in the very same direction. The scientific literature related to information retrieval and recent search engine patents reveal the not-so-distant future of search engine ranking algorithms.
Introducing Topic Specific Link Popularity
For the last few years search engines relied on General Link Popularity to assess the importance of every page. Relevancy was based on a combination of General Link Popularity (importance) and keyword matches on page and off page (anchor text of links for specificity).
General Link Popularity is measured by summing the weight of ALL incoming links to a page. With General Link Popularity ANY link improved the importance of a page. Webmasters started to buy high-PR links from totally unrelated sites. Pages were getting unrelated votes.
To combat this problem, Google implemented a Topic Specific Link Popularity algorithm. When a user specifies a query, Google determines the importance of a page by the Link Popularity it gets from RELATED to the keywords pages.
A link from a page will give you considerable Topic Specific Link Popularity when:
1) the page itself is optimized for your keywords
2) the page has a high General Link Popularity (PageRank)
3) the page is from a site owned by someone else (you can’t vote for yourself)
From a search engine’s point of view, implementing a Topic Specific Link Popularity algorithm is a very tough task when the queries need to be answered in less than a second.
All you need to know is this: the top ranked pages for competitive keywords are the ones with the highest Topic Specific Link Popularity.
You need links from pages that have high PageRank, are optimized for YOUR keywords and are owned by someone else.
How do you get these links?
1. Search for your keywords on Google and look at all pages that rank for your keywords. Seek links from these pages.
2. Reciprocal Links. Swap links with sites that can give you a link on a page optimized for your keywords. Look for pages with high PageRank that have your keywords in their title and in their incoming links. Reciprocal links work provided that they come from optimized for your keywords (related) pages.
3. Buy links from some of the top ranked for your keywords pages.
4. DMOZ and Yahoo’s directory usually have pages that are very well ranked for your keywords. You absolutely must get links from these pages. If you have a commercial site, don’t hesitate and buy a link from Yahoo immediately. It is well worth the $299.
5. Find out who links to the top ranked pages for your keywords. Many of their links will not be topic specific, but many WILL be. Try to get links from the related ones. A page is related when it has your keywords in its title, text etc.
6. Form a link exchange ring with some of your competitors. That’s a brutally effective strategy. Basically, you link to your competitors from your main optimized page (usually the home page) and they link to you from their most optimized page! Such rings can dominate the top positions and will be very difficult to outrank (it is difficult to get that amount of topic specific links). The caveat here is that the link exchange is on the main page and is not buried somewhere deep.
One more very important tip.
Increase the relevancy of the page that links to you by using your keywords in the anchor text and the description of your site! Yes, having keywords in the links pointing to your page increase your rankings not only by associating the keywords with your page but also by increasing the relevancy of the page that gives you the link! That’s the reason SEOs think anchor text is the most important factor. It is NOT. You can get a monstrous ranking boost from a link that does not use your keywords in the anchor text provided that the page has high PageRank and is optimized for your keywords (an example would be a DMOZ listing).
What about getting unrelated links?
Let’s say you buy a high PR unrelated link. The page that links to you does not have your keywords in the title and text. The only factor that makes the link relevant to your keywords is the anchor text to your site and your description. You’ll still get some benefit but that’s nothing compared to a link from an optimized for your keywords page.
Your site can’t get into Google’s top 1000 results?
If your site lacks Topic Specific Links, it may get filtered out from the results even if it has a good amount of PageRank (from non-related or affiliated sites). You need some threshold amount of Topic Specific Link Popularity to get into the top 1000 pages for very competitive keywords.
Two Final Points
1. Only one link per site can give you a Topic Specific ranking boost. Look for a link from the most optimized for your keywords page.
2. If you find a page that ranks well for your keywords, go for the link EVEN if that page has a lot of links on it.
To recap: the more optimized a page is for your keywords (measured by PageRank and keywords found on-page and off-page) the more Topic Specific Link Popularity Boost you will get from a link.
Topic Specific Link Popularity is and will be the key for top rankings. Anchor text plays a major role but it is not THE factor. PageRank is still very important especially the PageRank of the pages that link to you.
Hristo Hristov, owner of the Search Engine Optimization Guide
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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Search Engines are hard to tame, that’s for sure. But if you can get on their good side, search can be your biggest ally when it comes to generating tons of free traffic to your business web site. Not many people understand how search engines think. So, search engine “optimization” ends up either ignored or left up to highly paid experts.
You can do this yourself, or at least very affordably
Here’s a quick tip that you can put to use immediately that doesn’t require any specialized knowledge of the Internet. You can do this yourself if you know how to program HTML. Or, if you don’t, you can hire someone far more affordably than a Web Marketing guru to handle this for you. In fact, if you’re considering hiring a Web promotion expert to maximize your website’s placement in the search engines, you’re really better off doing as much of the housecleaning yourself as you can, before you call in the big guns. Otherwise, you’ll waste your money having them take care of trivial things you could handle yourself.
What Do Search Engines Think About?
Before I let you in on this simple secret, let me explain a little bit about how search engines “think”. You see, the job of a search engine, like Google, for example, is to make sure that people find a web page that’s incredibly likely to have the exact information they’re hunting for. The search engine does this by measuring and comparing two aspects of billions of pages: Popularity and Relevance.
Don’t get me wrong, just because it’s two things, doesn’t make it easy. To compute popularity and relevance requires tons and tons of processing power. In fact, Google only updates its popularity information once a month or so because it’s such a huge effort.
Is Your Page “Relevant”?
To determine whether your page comes up when someone searches, Google asks of your page: “Are you relevant to this search?” For example, a certain page might be the most popular page about socks and have the best information about socks you would ever want. But, if you’re looking for a new muffler, that page is not at all relevant, now is it?
Is this Accident Making Your Whole Site Less Relevant?
Having the world’s best information on mufflers isn’t enough to get you to the top of the heap, either… not if you make this easy mistake that seems to happen on nearly every web site at one time or another.
What is this silly mistake made on too many websites? Broken Links. You might recognize the error you see when you click on one and your browser says “404 Not Found” or “404 page not found“.
Intelligent search engines will subtract points from your search relevance if you have broken links on your web site. Not just your home page, mind you ? anywhere on your site at all. You see, the search engines view broken links as “stale” content. And as we covered earlier, the job of the search engine is to give the best possible results.
Maybe you’ve kept old links around when your web site was redesigned. Maybe you’ve linked to a buddy’s business, and now that web site is long gone. Maybe it was a simple typo… Hey! It could happen to anybody.
In the end, having broken links anywhere on your website will hurt your placement in search engine results. Before calling in an expert to help you with your search engine placement, make sure you double and triple check your web site for broken links.
Daiv Russell is a Web Marketing Strategist at Envision Software ? http://www.Envision-Web-Promotion.com - Learn the secrets behind Envision’s 4C Web Marketing System and see how we turned our web site from a dull, zero-traffic dead zone into a lead-generating powerhouse. http://www.EnvisionSoftware.com/Internet-Marketing-Secrets.asp
Written by SEO Tipster on July 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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