We are in the process of a traffic building campaign for our blog. Naturally, we want to get lots of traffic from Google. Our Google traffic is pretty good already, but any good webmaster is never satisfied. So, I am trying to increase the link popularity of our blog. But how? Well, here is a sort of “Cliff’s Notes ™” version as it relates to Google and link popularity:
Google loves sites that rank well in the organic results. A site like that means the webmaster has taken the time to create good content and visitors approve and they show it by bookmarking the site or subscribing to its RSS feed (see that big orange button on the right side of the page? hint, hint). The more visitors that go through this process, the more “votes” for that site in Google’s eyes. The more votes for a site, the higher its “off-site” ranking factor. When ranking a website, about 35% to 45% of the site’s ranking factor is made up of off-site data like this.
Google also tracks the number of links that point TO a website. These are called “backlinks” or IBLs (inbound backlinks). Google likes to see these. But wait – before you go out and submit to tons of online directories in an effort to increase your backlinks, Google wants to see QUALITY backlinks. That shows that you put some thought into your site and another quality web site is rewarding you with a link. For example, if your site is about sports and you somehow get ESPN to link to you, that would be a HUGE vote for your site. It would carry much more IBL weight than if you got your local high school sports blog to link to you.
You will also receive more IBL weight if the link to your site is contained in the textual content of the page. So, continuing our ESPN analgy, if you somehow got them to write an article about you and include a link to your web site within that article, that would be an even bigger vote for you in Google’s eyes. That type of link would be worth more than, say, a link at the bottom of the page.
Additionally, Google has an algorithm called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Google uses this to compare the words on the ESPN web page with the words on your web page. As expected, Google is very hush-hush about their indexing process. However, the LSI algorithm probably attributes more IBL weight to a link from a page with similar content. Meaning, if the ESPN page which contains your link is about football and the page on your website to which that link points is also about football, you get a weightier IBL.
So, getting other quality sites to link to your site is very important if you want to increase link popularity. But, how do you get quality sites to link to you? Here are a few methods you can employ:
- Press release distribution. Press release distribution is really the most effective way to increase link popularity. However, it is also the most difficult because you have to create a press release with juicy enough content so that publications will want to write something about it.
- Purchasing links from link brokers. This is a very easy method and it usually delivers plenty of IBLs to your site. But, these are typically not quality IBLs because they are often just put at the bottom of the page with a bunch of other links.
- Trading links with other websites (reciprocal linking, the least desirable). In the old days, this was a very popular way to get IBLs, “if you link to my site I will link to your site.” But search engines are now placing little value on these types of links because they are so easy to get and usually are not coming from quality sites.
- Link baiting. Very popular but also difficult. You have to create content that no one else offers. A video download, a piece of software or a well written article. If you succeed in that, people will link to you because you give them something that no one else does. Plus, they will usually tell others and the IBL chain grows.
- Blogs. This is really one of the best methods to employ. There are plenty of free blogging programs out there and that makes blogging easy for anyone to do. Search engines love blogs because a good blog is updated frequently and most of the content is all original. There are even social networks geared toward bloggers which help increase link popularity. One that we are members of is called Blogitive and there are several others which we will post about in the near future.
In conclusion (sounds real official, huh), improve your web site rankings by increasing your link popularity. If you have time to devote, the best way to increase your link popularity is by press releases, link baiting and blogging. If you do not have time for those methods, you can try buying links (frown) or getting reciprocal links (yuk).
