Link Popularity
If
you are already familiar with link popularity, we encourage
you to look at our various search engine positioning
services. The more incoming links you have (from other
websites), the better chance your search engine rankings will
improve. It's not just the volume of incoming links, but the
quality and relevance of the websites in which they come from
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, what words are used within the link
(i.e. "anchor text") which determines how well you should be
ranked for a target search term.
The blue underlined words in the
paragraph above (search engine positioning) is an example of
anchor text within a link pointing to our home page. If a
competitor of yours is both optimized AND has a stronger
number of inbound links from quality, relevant website with
proper anchor text, they are going to outrank you. Link
popularity has become THE dominant factor in who ranks the
highest within Google. Other major search engines such as
Yahoo and MSN also give a strong emphasis to back links
for their ranking criteria.
The Power of Anchor Text Search for
the words click here and you will see Adobe's Reader
download page coming up first in Google. Interesting enough,
the words click here do not appear anywhere within
their title tag nor anywhere on the content of that page. Yet,
they rank # 1 out of 857,000,000 results. The reason is they
simply have more links pointing into their website (using the
words click here as the anchor text) than any other
website. On a smaller scale, if you are targeting a
fairly niche industry, you may only need a handful of strong,
relevant inbound links (using your niche target search terms
within the anchor text) to move you to the top of the
rankings.
Why are links important? Here is a direct
quote from Google found on a page entitled, "How can I
improve my site's ranking?":
“In general, webmasters can
improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of
high-quality sites that link to their pages.”
If Link Building is so powerful, do I still
need to be concerned about internal optimization
efforts? The answer is a strong yes. Proper use of
unique title tags, site maps, link structures, header tags,
alt tags and good content is foundational to communicate to
the search engines what your page is about. Most search
engines pull your title tag as the first line of text within
their search engine results. Bottom line... you have to work
on both. This is why our packages include both optimization
AND various link building
services.
Most common ways to improve Link
Popularity:
-
Offer unique and helpful information on
your website which will cause others to want to link to you
without even asking.
-
Submit to quality directories who have
relevant sub-categories to your industry (we offer this service).
-
Distribute press releases to news related
sites to generate qualified traffic & awareness (we offer this service).
-
Look at the websites who are linking to your
competitors and ask them if they would link to you (we offer this service).
-
Ask business partners, vendors, distributors,
family members, golf partners, etc. to link to you!
|