All About Search Engines, cont. |
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Link Popularity |
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This is, by far, the most important thing you can do to get high
search engine rankings. This criteria was originated with Google
and it basically measures the relevance of a site to the keywords
based on how many other sites link to you. The theory is, if everybody's
linking to you, you must have some worthwhile content. It is a
wonderful system because it delivers the best on the web. Users
don't have to sort through pages of sites that "spammed"
their way to the top. But it also presents a tremendous challenge
to developers to get their site highly ranked.
This idea has caught on. Now Alta Vista, Excite, and MSN use
this criteria also (although perhaps in addition to other methods).
Teoma.com has enhanced this process by looking at the number of
links to your site from sites of related content.
This makes their search results from a query much more relevant
than basing the rank upon mere general popularity.
Number of Links Required
As described in the previous page, the actual number of sites
you need to link to you depends largely upon how many links
your competition has. If you can obtain more links, then you
will likely be listed higher in the search results. There is
a fuzzy element to this rule, however. If the links are "high
quality" links, they count more favorably. A high quality
link is a link from a site that has a high page rank.
Page Rank
In addition to the sheer number of pages linked to you, Google
also has a sophisticated Page
Rank algorithm that rates your page on a scale from 1 to 10.
Pages that link to you that have high Page Rank number have the
effect of boosting your PR.
To find out what the PR number is for a certain page, you need
to install the Google Toolbar.
This toolbar will only install in Internet Explorer in the Windows
operating system. (I'm a Mac person, but luckily I also have a
PC laptop) After installation there is a green progress bar with
the label "Page Rank." When a page loads in your browser,
simply roll the cursor over the green bar (don't click). In a
second or so a label pops up to indicate what the page's ranking
is. The increments are exponential, so getting to a rank of 4
or 5 is fairly easy. 6 or 7 takes a lot of work. 8-10 is next
to impossible except for very large sites.
Pages within your site may have different rankings. The home
page will be given a certain rank and all the pages in the site
that can be accessed directly from the home page will have the
same rank. However, pages that can only be accessed from 2nd level
pages will automatically be dropped 1 ranking point, and the same
continues as the linking becomes deeper. It is unrealistic (and
undesirable from a usability standpoint) for large sites to have
a link for every page on the home page. However, the home page
can provide numerous links in an organized fashion grouping navigational
links together, utility links together, etc. Then the 2nd level
pages can provide access to a majority of the other pages. A large
site with this approach will mostly have a ranking variance of
1 point or so.
How to Get Sites to Link to You
1. Write Great Content
Make your site worth coming to. Provide real value to the people
that visit. Make it informative, legible, usable, and accessible.
Make your content so good, people will want to put a link on their
site to add value to their own site's content and provide a positive
service to their own visitors.
2. Ask Your Readers to Link to You
It doesn't hurt to ask, and maybe it wouldn't occur to them to
link to you unless you do. It's important that the hyperlinked
text on their site contain your keywords, so you might consider
providing the HTML code for the link for them. They will see it
as a convenience for not having to write the code themselves (most
people are novices), and it will ensure that the link will be
most effective for you. For example:
We invite you to link to us.
For your convenience you can copy and paste this code:
<a href="http://www.academy-webdesign.com">Get your Web Design degree online</a>
3. Purchase Links from Other Sites
To get high search engine rankings you will have to spend some
money. You may find it beneficial to identify and contact sites
you would like to have link to you. Be careful of linking scams
where web promotion companies set up dummy pages to link to you.
This won't help you because you'll spend good money to be linked
to a page without real content. Search engines are getting smarter
and can tell whether the originating site has content related
to yours. Additionally sites that themselves have high visitor
counts and high search rankings will boost your rating. Dummy
pages can't do this. (There is one use for a dummy page, and I'll
discuss that on the next page.)
4. Get Linked in Directories
Getting listed in human edited directories improves your site's
link popularity. A directory listing is very strong link because
it is hosted by a large site. This improves rankings in the search
engines that use link popularity as a criteria. The most important
directories to submit to are: DMOZ, LookSmart, and Yahoo. DMOZ
is free, but you'll have to spend some money to get a good listing
in the other two. Details on registering with the directories
are on page 4 of this lecture.
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