spencerhoyt.com

The terminology between these varies somewhat depending on who you talk to, but generally Link Popularity is a count of links pointing to your page and Link Reputation involves the analysis of the text that point to a page.

Why do I care? Well link popularity is somewhat easy to achieve. The Internet is filled with FFA (Free For All) directories that anyone can get a link on furthermore, it is easy to get a link like Comit Technologies to point back to your website.

Wouldn’t you rather get a link like Fantastic Web Site Design to point back to your website. Or better yet Louisiana Web Site Design to point back to your site.

I am often quoted as saying “Every link counts as a vote! The more votes you get the higher you rank!” While this saying is accurate I would like to take it one step further. When you get a link like Nimlok pointing to your site it counts as a vote, but one vote is not going to make you rank high for your target keywords. To truly rank high you must get “votes” with your keywords pointing back to your site. With the keyword rich text links the search engines not only see a link which increases your link popularity, but they see keywords that link to your website which will increase your websites relevancy for Your Keyword Phrase on top of increasing your link popularity.

Directories are very useful tools that helped to form the Internet, but have little importance today. The biggest directory on the net is Yahoo and they have changed their policy in the last few years to move away from the human edited directory to a spidered search engine approach like Google.

Why?
For a directory to become successful you mast employ hundreds of human editors to review websites and approve what categories to place them in. With the speed of the Internet’s growth this approach is not financially feasible anymore. So now most of the search engines are moving to automated ways of doing this.

As an SEO you can spend countless hours finding and submitting your website to directories or you can focus that time on Real SEO Techniques. Your time is better spent building a spider friendly website and getting the search engine spiders to find your site naturally.

Link building can be one of the most challenging parts of SEO. Link Building is also one of the most important SEO must haves. Here is a list of some ways that I have come up with to help you with your link building campaign. Feel free to leave a comment with other ways.

• Search for who is linking to your competitors and ask them to link to you instead. This doubles your efforts if you convince them to switch.
• Find URLs that are currently linking to one or more of your pages and ask the appropriate Webmaster if they might also find value in other pages on your site (that you might suggest).
• Get a link in an appropriate category from an About.com Guidesite. The popularity of About and the extent of their quality links positions the network as a mandatory stop in a marketing campaign.
• Go to Google and search for “submit a link” AND “put your keyword phrase here.” You’ll be shown a list of sites that have link pages on them in your keyword area, and some of them may be worth writing to. “Submit a URL,” “add a URL,” etc., will work too.
• Look for linking opportunities within discussion lists related to your site’s topic. I often send short posts to appropriate lists with links for my clients’ sites, and if you do so properly, it is very effective.
• Submit your site to The Netscape Open Directory. What most folks don’t realize is that you can have multiple links to your site’s content as long as that content is a match for the category you are submitting to.
• Place a link to your website in the signature line of your e-mail.

These tips have been proven to help build link popularity. Feel free to leave a comment on your favorite ways to build links.
Spencer Hoyt

One of my daily reads Jim Boykin’s has posted an excellent tip on his blog. It is basically advice on how to get the most bang for your buck when building links.
Good Luck
Spencer

Building links to your website is one of the hardest pars of SEO. Links that are easy to get are often almost useless to the Search Engines. Search Engines look for links with PageRanks of 4 or above or to get a link from a .edu of .gov address. Finding these types of website to link to you can be challenging but with a little bit of work can be done.

2 great websites to try to get a link from are About.com and Wikipedia. Both websites look for good unique original content, but are fairly easy too get a link from if you meet the criteria. If you build these kinds of links your website will skyrocket in the search engine rankings.