Link Popularity for a Successful Website: How Not to Go About Getting It

Kai Virihaur

A classic way of getting seen and noticed on the web is to make sure your site is linked to as many other sites as possible. The strategy of link-exchange has been so overused and abused that search engines are now wary of it and may penalize sites that are linking to "link farms", or to any other sites with non-relevant content.

This is the way it should be. We all want our web browsing experience to be smooth and pleasant. We dont want to get frustrated by stumbling over irrelevant content while following links between sites. On the other hand, webmasters all want more traffic to their sites, and get frustrated when they dont get it. There are two types of benefits from having many links to your website:

- Get improved ranking by the search engines - if you are popular, you are probably worth a visit

- People not just search bots actually follow the links and find your site!

If done properly, link popularity improvement is an extremely important strategy to make your website successful. Broadly speaking, you can achieve this in a number of ways:

The classic link exchange link swap method; two webmasters agree to swap links
You pay to get incoming links from high-ranking websites
By writing articles and getting them posted on other websites; including a link to your own site
By getting your articles published in E-zines, with links back to your site
You participate in online forums, where a link to your site may be included with each post
You start a blog/RSS feed, and get it spread to many subscribers!

All these methods involve work, in varying amounts. Method #2. costs you money, the rest may be essentially no-cost. Method #4. will probably not contribute to search engine ranking, but may give you droves of targeted visitors.

The problem with method #1. is that its tedious. But you can get software that may automate it by helping you find link partners and manage your link collection. I am aware of these software tools:

ARELIS I have tested this tool, and it seems very promising. It goes out and searches for link exchange partners according to different search methods which you specify. For me, looking for incoming links at sites similar to my own gave the best results. The program then quickly returned many relevant sites. Next, it helps you contact webmasters and keeps the link collection neatly organized. It also creates the link pages.

Zeus A bit similar to ARELIS, but I find it much clumsier. The only way it can search for link candidate sites is thru a list of 100+ search phrases. In my hands, this method produced very low- quality results. At the time of writing, I am trying to get a refund from the company that sells Zeus. They seem very reluctant to honour their money-back guarantee. Buyer beware!

Links Manager This program does not go out and search for link partner sites; it only handles swap requests and organizes the link collection. I have not tested it myself.

When building a link swap strategy, note that the search engines are getting increasingly sophisticated in judging the quality of your links. Some things to remember:

Outbound links ONLY to quality sites with content relevant to your site; never "link farm" type sites
Make sure the sites that you link to have not been penalized. This would affect you also!
Incoming links that are placed on the same page as 100:s of other links wont help you; their value gets "diluted"
The anchor text in the incoming links is very important. It should contain relevant keywords; but all links should not have identical text - this looks artificial in the virtual eyes of the search bots

If you follow these guidelines, I believe link swap can still be an important strategy for building a successful web presence.

Conclusion: Link popularity improvement, if you do it the proper way, is still of enormous importance for a successful website. But if done the wrong way, it may backfire. If you want to try the classic link swap method, I recommend using ARELIS www.axandra.com to make it less tedious.

About The Author

Kai Virihaur is a researcher, web developer, and artist. He runs The Hosting Finder www.thehostingfinder.com , a web hosting directory featuring articles and RSS feeds on web development, website promotion, and online marketing.

This article may be used freely as long as this resouce box, with intact hyperlink, is included.

To provide some examples of web design and development I give you here:

10 latest blog posts by Web Developer Jim Westergren

SEO for WordPress - The Complete Guide

I’m an SEO and I have been working a lot with WordPress, here I give you all my tips for you to rank very well in Google with your blog. UPDATE: Check this blog post for a better guide. Quick Facts There are 55 million blogs out there, if you don’t stand out you will have no chance. The [...]

New site design

Update, March 9th I have now changed it again and put some color into it. What do you guys think? Sunday today and I was away from work with clients so I decided to work with my blog today from home. I made a new design for this site. Check out the navigation links at the top left [...]

Checklist when won a web site auction

This article is written for my friend “honey” (site). I have been bidding against honey on web site auctions for almost 2 years now. I have won maybe 60 auctions and I have now over 100 web sites. Honey owns over 300 … So here comes my checklist that I want to show honey as I [...]

Protect yourself from invalid Adsense clicks

Have you also heard of those horror stories of Google banning Adsense accounts for the smallest mistakes? You have read the Terms and Conditions and you know the basics but what do you do when you show your friend your site on your computer and the first thing he does is to click the Adsense ad [...]

Updating PR values of 1066 URLs in 30 minutes

This article is written more for myself so I remember how I do it the next time but probably a few people will also benefit from this for different uses and purposes. Today I updated all the PR values for the directories listed on my directory list. I had to update each listing in the MySQL [...]

Worst Web Design Ever

Official site of a children’s hospital in Japan Hey, your “logo” is not blinking! MSY Technology Pty. Ltd. Are you sure product X is HOT? Personal site of Franz Magnus Incredible that you got several awards for that site. Angren.net, electronic shop Can’t you squeeze in something more on the home page? Official site of Northbridge Police Department Still being updated in 2006. Perhaps [...]

Fighting the War Against Web Site Spam Bots

The last days I have been fighting in the war against the latest spam bot soldiers like a maniac. I own and manage over 70 web sites. This includes different forums, directories, blogs, topsites, article submission sites and you name it. Very recently there is a new wave of spam. The default captcha for vBulletin is now [...]

Link to Me Textbox WordPress Plugin

This is a WordPress plugin that will give you more links and higher rankings in the search engines. Most bloggers knows the importance of getting links in order to get high rankings in search engines. But did you know that the best links are those that are natural recommendations? Additionally I experienced better rankings across all [...]

Tutorial: Automatic Site Map for WordPress

To improve the navigation of your users as well as search engine traffic and ranking to your WordPress blog I suggest making a good site map of your posts - a map of your site. A kind of user friendly archive of your posts. This is not “Google sitemap”! The benefits: The user can quickly find a [...]

Rank bragging

How I rank on different keywords and links to the different SE queries.

RELATED ARTICLES

The Meta Tag Myth
The more the better right Wrong. At least when it comes to meta tags. The history of the meta tag started off as a nice tool that web sites could use to show the search engines what the site was about without the words showing up on the actual page. It seemed like a great idea until people started to abuse the meta tag. They would add highly searched for keywords that were unrelated to their site in their meta tags in hopes of attracting additional traffic. The search engines caught on and lowered the importance of meta tags - they figured out that if they put more emphasis on the visible content of a site, people would have a much more difficult time “cheating”. Turns out that they were right.

Bound To Your Old Expensive Web Host by Fear
Bound To Your Old Web Host’s Sky High Rates By Fear

Image Formats-GIF, JPEG, BMP
When browsing the internet you are likely to come across many different image formats. However, the most common formats are: CompuServe GIF, JPEG, and Bitmaps.

Mobile Accessibility - Your website in the year 2005
Throughout 2004 the number of web enabled portable devices boomed. By “portable devices" I mean PDAs and smart phones. What does this mean for you Well it depends whether or not you care about your visitors’ experience - you build your website for visitors so you really should!

How Does Your Website Measure Up
Does your website make a good first impression Is the navigation intuitive Is the content appropriate for your audience Youve had your website up and running for a while now but youve always had a nagging suspicion that your website is lacking effectiveness and you just cant put your finger on it. Youve dabbled with colors, added/removed images re-written the text but it still feels as if everything just isnt working together. Wouldnt it be nice if you had a way to sort things out Well now you do!

Colors for Your Website
Oh Yes ..Colors! There are hot ones, cool ones, earthy colors, spiritual colors and every other shade in the rainbow! What colors should you use for your website

Are your SEO efforts going to waste
Search engine optimization SEO is a long and complicated process that can be highly rewarding if done correctly. SEO is not a waste of time, but can be if your site doesn’t appeal to visitors or function properly. Your potential customer will be turned off if your site lacks trustworthiness, an eye pleasing color scheme and easy to use navigation. Why lose visitors and possible sales because of a small design flaw or unappealing color scheme Those visitors could have resulted in sales if those small imperfections were fixed.

How Do I Submit My Site To Search Engines
Youve built up a good site, put in a lot of content, but none ofthe search engines lists your site If youd like to know how togo ahead with Search Engine Submission the right way, read on.

5 Simple Steps to Protect your Digital Downloads
A couple of days ago, I was searching for a popular eBook online.

Can They Use Your Website In A TV Broadcast About Scams
When you designed your website, you probably dreamt about how wonderful it would be if one day a popular TV program featured it, and you would become famous overnight, and make lots of $$$.

Marketing Your Web Site
Congratulations!Your Web Site is finished!Now whatYour first instinct is to submit to every search engine possible and leave it up to them to bring traffic to your site.Despite what you may have been told, it doesn’t happen quite that way.Yes, you will need to submit to the search engines, and they will eventually bring traffic your site.It will take anywhere from 3 – 6 months for a search engine to even get you listed.After that another year or so to make it to the top of the listings, that is, if you are extremely diligent in promoting to them monthly and following all the different rules for each search engine.

Beautiful Web Sites Seldom Make More Sales
Designing an E-commerce Web site is not as simple as having a "pretty" site that is a pleasure to visit. While it is important to have an attractive site, as much thought must be given to functionality as to appearance.

The Smartass Series #1 -- Guide to Building the Perfect Website: a Narrative How-to on Five Top Web Advisors You Should Use instead of this Know-it-all who Knows Little
~A man [woman] is a success if he [she] gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he [she] does what he [she] wants to do.Bob Dylan~

How To Design Your Website
This article is for people who are new to web designing and want some idea how to design your web site so as to gain maximum traffic on their website.Here in this article i will show you how to present information want in your web site. Many people while designing their web sites do not consider the needs of the user .I myself,a few days back was looking for some information. Like all of us do,i opened google and typed in the keywords and i certainly got many good links on the screen .I went on and clicked on one of the link.On reaching the page,i found some more links but no information .I went inside the link looking for information and again i found more links but still no valuable information .I got frustrated and i logged off from the net.

Avoid Getting Ripped Off By A Hosting Company...
Chances are if you host multiple domains or websites you are spending too much money at your current hosting provider. Other hosting companies increase their profits by forcing you to create an additional hosting account every time you want to host a new domain or website. Let’s say you have five 5 websites and they each cost you $10.00 a month. It is obvious you are spending $50 a month to host those five 5 websites, but did you know that you are getting ripped off

Customers Dont Always Connect Where They Live
Pop Quiz:You have an international website and you want to do business in Canada.But you want to make sure your website delivers top performance to your Canadian customers: speed, accessibility, as well as proper functioning of digital certificates, forms, password protections, shopping carts and more.In which of the following cities would want a website monitoring stationToronto, Canadas metropolisMontreal, Canadas second largest cityVancouver, Canadas third largest city.Ottawa, Canadas capital and fourth largest cityCalgary, Canadas fifth largest city.

Are You Getting The Most From Your Meta Tags
As any Web Business startup knows, creating a Website is a bunch of work! You have to bother with content, layout, graphics and HTML links, just to name a few. What about your Meta Tags

CSS - Maximum Benefits
What is CSS

Flash Deadly Sins that can kill your web business
Looks like every client wants a Flash site these days but the reality is...as flashy as these sites may look, there are many negatives you may want to consider before delving into Flash.

Hexadecimal Color Notation on the Web
When designing elements for your webpage, you will often be called upon to specify a color. For example, the code for a span shown below specifies that the color of the text within the span will be yellow.