~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Paul Corsi
Knowing that link popularity is increasingly more important to search
engine rankings and that quality links are extremely important, are
there any link exchange programs that you can recommend exploring?
I used to belong to a now-discontinued program called Buddy Links and
the sites I was optimizing for easily went to number 1 in most engines
with all the incoming links from this program. Even though the links
were not relevant to my sites, the assist in higher rankings was
dramatic.
So I know this works. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Paul Corsi
West Indies Web Design
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Hi Paul,
We have talked about link popularity extensively in issues:
[ http://www.rankwrite.com/archives/issue016.htm ] and
[ http://www.rankwrite.com/archives/issue021.htm ], and I don't want
to be too repetitive. However, since this topic seems to be first and
foremost on a lot of optimizers' minds, it might be helpful to discuss
it a bit more.
Unrelated links to your site are only minimally helpful to high
rankings. They may have worked in the past, but from my understanding
of how the engines currently rank sites, unrelated links won't have
much effect on rankings these days. What DOES seem to boost rankings
in many search engines is having a good ranking in the major
directories (e.g., Yahoo!, Dmoz, NBCi, Go). Nearly all of my top
ranked sites have no external links pointing to them, but have top 10
rankings in most of the directories. So if link popularity is an
important factor, I believe it's directory listings that are the key.
Your directory listing should be in an appropriate category, and get a
high ranking for the same keyword phrases you would like to be ranked
high with in the spidering search engines. This is yet one more
reason to learn the ins and outs of submitting to the human-edited
directories. For more information on submitting to directories,
please read my article on this topic at:
[ http://www.rankwrite.com/directorysubmit.htm ].
For sites that are trying to rank high with extremely competitive
keywords, it may be helpful to actively search out links from other
relevant Web sites. This doesn't mean you should go out and create a
whole bunch of domains yourself and link them all together. It means
you should look for sites that use the same keywords that your site
uses, and see if they have a links page where they'd be willing to
place your link. Industry-specific portals/directories are great for
this.
Interestingly enough, if your site is well written and provides a lot
of useful information, you won't have to search out external links at
all. Other sites will link to yours of their own volition. We have
seen this process in action with our Rank Write Roundtable site.
Without actively requesting any links (other than the major
directories and a few sites that list email newsletters), many highly
relevant sites have added Rank Write to their list of links. Each
week in our referrer logs, we find more and more sites that have added
our link. This, of course, is the ideal, and isn't going to happen
for every site. However, it is within your power to make it happen!
What you need to ask yourself is how can you make your site so good
that others will be only too willing to link to it, without you even
having to ask for it? If you can figure that out, you won't have to
worry about link popularity ever again!
As an aside, I have just finished a more detailed article on this
topic, which is scheduled to be published at the end of this month.
I'll let you all know when it's up on the Rank Write site.
Jill
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