Ever wondered how to increase your websites’ ranking and link popularity?
If you want to appear in the lime light and attract a steady stream of unique visitors while having a website appealing enough to attract new visitors, you have to be savvy enough to market yourself, your product or your business with verve.
Aside from the fact that millions of others are currently competing for dozens of your most powerful keywords and traffic, there are other factors involved that determine relevance and website popularity. Patience is a virtue when building traffic, keep in mind that it may take a few months to get some traction in search engines and a method for building links to get the word out.
If you are starting from scratch, you need to start with the name. Choosing the right name for your domain can save you thousands of marketing dollars down the road for search engine optimization and promoting your website. Why is that, you may ask? because using keywords in the domain name immediately establishes your website in the upper echelon for that term, just by virtue of the domain. It doesn’t mean that you can omit building links or using a social network, but it does give you an added advantage when you need to get traction for those keywords / terms.
If you can tactfully add a few keywords in the title of the website when you purchase the domain, you inherently are optimizing those terms (even if they are used as semantic / pivotal qualifiers in a singular or plural form) market, marketing, markets, etc.
The Benefits of using a blog Using a word press blog as an optimized content management system (CMS) makes launching a authority website as easy as creating your main layout in XHTML, making it the word press theme (your website template), adding a few SEO Plug Ins and inserting fresh content on a regular basis. See example here www.seodesignsolutions.com
Blogging your way to website authority is a very effective method and if you understand a few basic rules about keyword density or semantics and how they impact the ranking and relevance of documents, then hitting the top 10 can be as easy as sending an email, once your blog has hit critical mass in your niche.
*On a side note, when we first started this site, I would spend hours researching the keywords, use SEO tools to determine the appropriate keyword density, make adjustments (by building links from 5 other relevant pages) to ensure that it had a sufficient number of inbound links from the internal link architecture enough external back links from other sites, shift the titles and descriptions over the course of a few weeks and continually tweak and make adjustments to the pages to give them the strongest correlation to what search engines looked for.
Then after adding a blog to a subdirectory, adding a few plug ins and focusing on content that was designed to appeal to the audience instead of just search engines, something phenomenal occurred, hordes of website traffic. This in turn got the attention of search engines spiders (who now have befriended the site) who update content overnight or in 48 hours as opposed to two or three times per month like in the beginning, which leads to a very strong fundamental.
Content creation and frequency of adding or modifying content.
The frequency that you add content determines how search engine spiders (a) rank your website and (b) the rate at which they return. Websites known for producing content consistently have a special place in search engines, they are called “authority sites” and information can be updated by the hour in search engines for new information and content that is added to such sites.
So essentially, the way to impact rankings is to have succinct content readily available for the topics related to the type of visitors you wish to attract. If you have a website that has 3 pages of content about a topic, and a competitor has 30 (well constructed and informative) pages, who do you think will get the vote as an authority?
The Deciding Factor (for visitors and spiders) Content You may have heard this a million times, but now your going to hear it a million and one, content truly is king and rightly so for various reasons.
1) It provides visitors with interesting and compelling information.
2) it is the answer and solution to a problem or provides intrigue to someone seeking more information about a topic.
3) It has the ability to distinguish the author, website or company by virtue of the level of how they communicate. Search engine spiders (just like humans) are just as selective to what they label as “an authority” as opposed to a parrot or lack luster content.
4) because people tend to gravitate towards content with a spin or method that distinguishes it from others.
5) because search engines love it and reward you for creating useful resources for the web at large.
For example, if your site is a resource that consolidates a broad topic into a streamlined user friendly interface, encourages user participation through polls, comments, or through another web 2.0 interface allowing users to share prospectives content or interests, then traffic will not be a problem, setting the tone through moderation might be however.
The point is, instead of obsessing over content or procrastinating over it (as we can be our own worst critic) it’s better to create content regularly and not to try to write a thesis or create the perfect post, article or page every time. Some days your fingers can hardly keep up with the stream of information you mind produces, other days you may have to struggle to write 5 paragraphs.
Just realize that you will not always hit the nail on the head every time, nor will your audience respond to every post the way you may have envisioned. The key here is to develop content with the understanding that it can transcend the immediate needs of when or why you wrote it and age like a fine wine over time and serve as a resource down the road.
Popular topics do not stay popular forever and eventually they get archived for new and improved or fresher content, but in which case writers are known to look for reference material to further establish their point and validate a theory etc. If you write succinctly enough, then your material may in fact be the reference material of tomorrow, so make each page as useful and specific as possible.
This is the purpose for more patient types who write for the resource value as opposed to the flash in the pan. Especially if your material is well written and makes reference to other sites higher up the food chain. Who you link to can be just as powerful as who links to you, but that is another topic in it’s entirety.
Also, after the search engines have made their rounds and indexed your content, it can snowball over time and gain it’s own momentum, or links (either through link building or people linking to the content) and can essentially make it’s debut when any number of the phrases are entered in a typical search query. This known as long tail search engine optimization and is which occurs naturally over time, especially when your website or blog reaches over 200 pages (if done correctly this alone can get the attention as an authority site alone).
Enough conjecture let’s get into the how to part of the article.
1. Sign up for your local chamber of commerce or the Better Business Bureau (if you are a business) is a great start. The more links you have that can pass trust rank the better.
2. Getting links from directories like Best of the Web, Business.com or Yahoo Directory can give your site a boost in search engines as a result of the age and authority these sites possess.
3. Adding articles that stream fresh content you your pages from RSS feeds, or using article marketing to increase link popularity are also great strategies.
4. Using directories to get the word out, although there are hordes of resources that provide information on directories, look for distinctive directories that have page rank on the pages your link would appear.
5. Write world class content and don’t be afraid to make your pages a bit more meaty than most. Search engines like a page with 750-1000 words on a topic. Not providing enough information or having it sparsely related in context is not the way to befriend the spiders or visitors who are investigating your content. If you entice them with a title, make sure the content it proclaims is on the page, link bait is great, but content truly is king.
6. Build links to your pages with a range of keywords using on topic websites, blogs, deep linking directories (that allow you to use more than the home page to link to) or you can hire an expert to build links for you.
7. If you have a blog, make sure you have an RSS feed. Syndicating your content can be accomplished through using services such as Feed Burner, or other providers of (really simple syndication). Once in place, every time you post a page in your blog, your site will ping the search engines to let them know it’s dinner time. Once the table is set, your rankings get a boost for content well written as it adds to the global link popularity of your website.
8. Link to sites that are more established than your own. This can score you points with search engines who group sites by association. In Google for example, you can use the related tab under the search result next to the cache information to determine how the search engine sees that page in relation to other web content.
9. Deep link from pages with high traffic to sub folders or pages deep in your site. Adding a link from a blog to another page on your site is the equivalent of brushing off the cobwebs and stating that “yes, there is something worth revisiting and sharing with others”. If you really want to kick it up a notch, make a change to the old page (make a title more relevant, rewrite the description or touch up the on page content) add links from a page with traffic (an article, a blog, etc.) and see the page take on new life after search engine spiders visit.
10. Socially bookmark your posts and use informative link baiting to entice traffic to visit your site. If you write excellent content this tactic is all you need. Take the time to join social media sites, there is a list under this blog in the share this tab. Once your signed up, you can add your own pages at will to any of the service providers you have a membership with. Stumble Upon for example has the ability to drive more traffic in 2 hours than most websites get in a month, so hitting a hot list in any of a social media site can be the overall objective to drive traffic to your site.
Traffic is one ingredient, website authority is another and having the ability to find the audience that is most suited for conversion for your products or services is another. The idea is, to see each component for what it is a piece of the puzzle that can put your site over the top if harnessed properly.
Traffic equals popularity which means search engines will visit more frequently, if you build links for specific exact match terms then you can enhance your relevance for your niche while using article marketing (to warm up the sale) to find visitors seeking services that are employing the look before you leap search tactic before they purchase.
Although there are numerous other strategies, methods and tactics we could discuss, I hope this at least provides a stepping stone outlining the fundamentals of link popularity and how to increase exposure to your websites relevance in search engines.
How to Increase Website Link Popularity - To learn more about this author, visit Jeffrey L. Smith's Website.
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