Link popularity . . . One of the keys to top search engine ranking.

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2003 Promotions Unlimited  All rights reserved.

Getting your web site ranked high on the top search engines is critical for achieving Internet success.  In the recent past, the only thing you had to do to gain top search engine placement was to give your page a great title, use the right keywords and add a good meta tag description.

    Those were yesterday's rules. Today the rules have changed.

7 of the top 12 search engines are now factoring in link popularity

when determining a site's position in search results. This means your web

pages may be perfectly optimized for good search engine placement

and still rank low. 

Increasing your link popularity can dramatically improve your search engine rankings. Improve your search engine rankings and you can't help but do more business.

 Link popularity

is the total number of web sites that link to your site. The more links pointing to your site, the greater your link popularity rating. The idea is if a large number of web sites are willing to create links to your web site, a search engine assumes you have information that is worthwhile to their customers. By using link popularity as a ranking criteria, the search engines are ensuring their clients will get a more relevant search result. The greater your link popularity rating, the higher your web site will rank in the search engine directory.

How do you increase link popularity?

In the past, you literally had to visit a number of sites and ask them to link back to your site.

·         Or you could pay for links.

·         Or you could submit your site to hundreds of FFA link directories and hope the search engines indexed the sites before your postings expired.

·         Or you could write articles and hope they would get published and indexed.

·         Or you could visit a lot of discussion boards, post, and hope your message would be indexed.

All in all, a hit-and-miss proposition which might or might not work. Many sites have set up ‘link-farm’ services. Some are free to join and others charge a nominal monthly. When it comes to these types of services, the best advice is to stay away . . . far away from them. The search engines are on to this ‘shortcut’ tactic and will actually lower your site’s ranking or remove it from their index when they find it on your site (yes, they have techniques for spotting this).

A manual email request to another Webmaster has been the standard in the past. Recently, specific software has become available that automates the locating of similar teamed sites, individually emailing them a link request and creating a link directory on your site. One of the best features of such software is the ability to quickly verify that your link is still on your partner’s site. Such link verification should be done at least once per month to insure that the linking webmasters are holding up their side of your reciprocal link agreement.

Link popularity - reciprocal links -- the easy way

After much investigation, I can assure anyone interested in achieving higher search engine rankings should be sure to develop a solid reciprocal linking strategy. The easiest way to do this is with the

In February all our directories had traffic increases over January.

Though one month traffic comparisons

are not that meaningful, traffic trends are very important. The traffic trends for all our directories have been improving. Using our smaller Sacramento directory as an example, below is a table showing traffic patterns for the last six months.

Unique Visitors to our Sacramento CA Directory

Partial excerpt from a February 28,2003, letter received from one of our newest clients:

"I estimate that our Internet new client business has increased by almost 50% in just the six short weeks we have joined your directories! Our workers compensation listing in your San Jose directory has generated six new cases. I know this fact since we are not advertising this particular specialty elsewhere."

*Note - The above attorney, as well as a number of our top producing clients, have multiple photo listings.  Not only are these listings within several specialties, but across multiple city directories.

Even if you want to only stay with one specialty, a good referral partnership with another associate could return many times your investment in another of our directories.

If you have a website be sure to apply for our FREE  Lawyer Legal Website Excellence Award .

It will drive traffic to your firm. *See form below. . .