7 Steps to Greater Link Popularity and Higher Search Engine Rankings

Link Popularity is one of the most important factors affecting your Search Engine rankings. When your site is popular with other web-sites, the Search Engines love you, but if you are the new kid on the block, they ignore you - totally. It's great to be popular and improving your Link Popularity will also get you higher rankings on the search engines.

Why is Link Popularity important for Higher Rankings?

Search Engines are just software programs that try to analyze the utility and validity of your content with regard to certain keywords. They also try to understand the importance or ranking of your site against all competing sites in their indices.

Just How do Search Engines Learn About the Utility and the Validity of Your Content?

Search Engines just love sites that users love to visit. They love it even more if users spend more time at the site before they browse away. Now how do they know which sites humans love? Obviously with the billions of web pages on the world wide web, the Search Engines cannot manually go to each site and check their content. They let other humans do that work for them. Then they watch as others link to your site. They watch your Link Popularity.

Link popularity simply means how popular are you on the World Wide Web. And your popularity is determined by the number of people linking to your website. The greater the number of external links pointing to your web-site, the greater your ranking. Simple, isn't it?

Here is how to find YOUR link popularity: Go to Google.com and type in "link: followed by your URL". This returns all the sites that link to you in the Google index. eg. link:http://www.yourdomain.com.

How Do You Get a Lot of People to Link to You?

Getting people to link to you is easy if you establish your presence. Show that you are a master of your domain. Even if you deal in manure, and there are people out there wanting to know more about it, you have an audience. And if you establish your presence well enough, the links will automatically follow.

Here are a few ways you can increase your inbound links.

1) Articles: Almost anybody can write articles. This is the easiest way to get started on your way to Search Engine manna. It's just a question of putting down your thoughts in a coherent manner. As long as the information you are providing is useful and valid, your articles will be sought after by publishers out there. There are also hundreds of article directories on the net.

To find article directories, Google 'Article Directories'. You get nearly 53 million hits. There are also some awesome free tools available for this.

For those with a morbid fear of writing, you can find 'Ghostwriters' as well as 'Virtual Assistants' on the Internet. Search on Google for those terms and you will find many a link to sites that provide you suitable services. You may also use sites like Elance.com and RentACoder.com for people who will write articles for you.

2) Blogs: Blogs are not as easy to do as Articles are. But they are a very useful tool, nevertheless. When you have a blog, you have an audience. It's like a fan base. They have certain expectations of you. They want you to churn out hit singles or albums. But they want you to give them more. Even though they started out as mere diaries or daily jottings of a few people, currently they are excellent link building, content management and search engine optimization tools.
In fact almost any industry can have a blog portal. As always run a search and you will find something in your industry. Or you can go to blogger.com or wordpress.com to start your own blog free of charge.

3) Free Products: The easiest way to do this is to write a tool and offer it for download. Or maybe even provide a service for free. The greatest example of building a business with free service that comes to mind is hotmail.com. Once your service becomes a must-have, it's only a matter of time before you can start making money from it. Also you can have people point to your site to give their customers access to your tool.

4) Trackbacks: This is the easiest way to get your links out there. What you do is go to other blogs (Authority Sites) in your industry and become a regular contributor. Or comment on the blogs. Along with your signature, most people offer a link to your web-site. And the more links you have pointing back to you, the more popular you get. Also, when you become a major contributor/commentor, people start valuing your opinion more.

5) Syndication: You can offer your articles to other sites for publishing for free or for payment. Your article links back to your site.

6) Reciprocal links: You offer a link to another peer site, in return for them linking back to you. This is a good way to get your target industry users to come to your site. Also you introduce your users to other sites that they may be interested in visiting. They will be thankful to you for pointing them in the right direction. And they come to trust you more.

7) Partner links: Your local Chamber of commerce, Suppliers, Resellers, Affiliates, Sites selling complementary products etc.

Link Building

There are three types of links which will increase link popularity for a website.
Internal links :

Incoming links :

Outgoing links :

Link popularity is defined as the number of links pointing to and from related websites and it is an extremely important method for improving sites relevancy in search engines.

Internal links :

Number of Links to and from pages within a site is called as internal link popularity. Search engine spiders find and index important related pages quicker if some pages are buried deep within the site when we do cross linking of important related Pages

Incoming links :

Incoming links are of 2 types.

1. (Links from sites we control)
2. (Links from sites we don’t control)

Links pointing to a website from other related sites is called incoming link popularity.
To find link popularity for a website or which sites are linking to our website or competitors website we need to go to Google search box and enter “link:” followed by domain name with out using “www”

>> More on Incoming Links

Outgoing links :

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site.

How much importance outgoing links add to a site's link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists

>> More on Incoming Links

Site maps :
Site maps leads to links which leads to most or all pages of the website. Site maps are hierarchically organized. Site maps are visual models of web site content that allows users to find specific webpage. If more pages are available in a website it is recommended to have a site map, by using site map search engine spiders will crawl the links and index the entire వెబ్సైటు.

Outgoing links

Outgoing links :

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site. How much importance outgoing links add to a site's link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists

Link keywords :

It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords play a major part in determining the relevancy of a Web page, it is essential that they are also included in link text.

Link quality :

The quality of the links is just as important. The types of sites we should concentrate on getting links from include, Major search engines like (Google.com), popular search portals like (MSN.com), web directories like(Yahoo.com and Open Directory Project - dmoz.org), high trafficked sites like (eBay.com and Amazon.com), news sites like (CNN.com), and sites related to our site's theme.

Link exchanges and farms :

Do not get links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. All of the major search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links.

Incoming links

Incoming links are of 2 types.

1. (Links from sites we control)
2. (Links from sites we don’t control)

Links pointing to a website from other related sites is called incoming link popularity.
To find link popularity for a website or which sites are linking to our website or competitors website we need to go to Google search box and enter “link:” followed by domain name with out using “www”

For example:

Link: tipsoninterview.com

1. Links from sites we control
It is good to do cross linking of our web sites. Select keywords that describe the site we are linking to. The reason for doing this is because some of the major search engines, such as Google, place a great importance on the text used within, and close to, links.

2. Links from sites we don't control
There are two ways of finding sites to link to our website. The best way to get other sites to link to our website is to ask them politely. And the best way to find likely candidates is to ask web sites that link to your competition.

Once we have compiled a list of related sites, add a link of those website to our web site. Then send an email to each web site owner informing them that we have linked to their site and politely ask them for a link back to our site.

Another way of finding sites to link to our web site is to find web sites that accept site submissions. To find such web sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for:

"add url" “keyword"

Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases we enter. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following sets of search phrases:

add site +keyword
add link +keyword
Submit url +keyword
Submit site,
Submit link,

we can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. By replacing the "add url" search phrase with one of the following page names we get the submission pages.

addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html.

submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html.

Add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html,

Submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html,

add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html,

submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html

Internal links

Number of Links to and from pages within a site is called as internal link popularity. Search engine spiders find and index important related pages quicker if some pages are buried deep within the site when we do cross linking of important related pages

Keyword Placement- where to place keywords

1.Keywords in title tag :
As per HTML specifications it is not mandatory to write something in the 'title' tag. In case if you leave title tag empty then the title bar of the browser will read as “Untitled Document” or similar, for SEO purposes it is good to use 'title' tag.

The title tag must be short with in 6 to 7 words and the keyword must be near the beginning. Keyword in the title tag is one of the most important places because what is written inside the 'title' tag shows in search results as your page title.

Search engines (including Google). Mostly display content of the 'title' tag.

For example:

The title tag of the home page for the http://see-seo-tips.blogspot.com can include something like this:

'title' Search Engine Optimization Tips – go through these useful interview tips to be successful in interviews. '/title',

'title' Search Engine Optimization Tips - Everything You Need to Know regarding interview tips '/title'

2.Keywords in URL :

Keywords in URLs help a lot in getting better position in search engine result pages.
Eg:-http://srihithas.com/webdesigning.html,

Where “webdesigning’” is the keyword phrase where we attempt to rank well. But if we don't have the keywords in other parts of the document, we don’t need to rely on having them in the URL.

The domain name and whole URL plays an important role IN SEO process. The presumption is that if our web site is about cows, you will have “cows”, “cow”, or “calf” as part of our domain name. For instance, if our web site is mainly about cow milk , it is much better to name your cow site “cow-milk.net” than “animal-milk.org”,

Because in the first case we have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one we have no more than one potential minor keyword.

Don’t be greedy when hunting for keyword rich domain names. From search engine optimization point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL.

But if we imagine the URL by using 5 potential keywords it will be long and difficult to memorize. So we need to balance keywords in the URL and the site usability. So it is advisable to use less than or equal to 3 keywords in the URL.

Directory names and file names are also important. Often search engines will give preference to pages that have a keyword in the file name.

For instance http://ourdomain.com/interview-tips.html is not as good as http://tipsoninterview.com/interview-tips.html but is certainly better than http://ourdomain.com/interview-guidence.html. The advantage of using keywords in file names over keywords in URLs is that they are easier to change, if you decide to move to another niche.

3.Keyword density in document text :

After we have chosen the keywords that describe our web site the next step is to make our web site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for our target keywords. Keyword density is a common measure of how relevant a page is, the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. Recommended keyword density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. We can check keyword density by Keyword Density Checker tools which are available freely.

If we make keyword stuffing there are severe penalties including ban from the search engine because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

4.Keyword stuffing :

Keyword density over 10% and above which are artificially inflated in a webpage is regarded as Keyword stuffing and there is a risk of getting banned from search engines.

5.Keywords in anchor text :

If you have keyword in the anchor text in a link from another web site, this is regarded as getting a vote not only from this web site but also from your site in general but about the keyword in particular. So it is good to have anchor text for inbound links.

6:Keywords in headings (H1, H2, etc tags) :

Keyword in header tags counts a lot. But before placing ensure that the web page has actual text about the particular keyword.

From literacy point of view headings separate paragraphs into related subtopics. From seo point of view it is good to have as many headings on a page as possible even though it may be pointless to have a heading after every paragraph, Especially if we have keywords in the headings.

Even though there is no technical length limits for the contents of h1, h2, h3,…. h5 tags.

We need to be wise with the length of headings; too long headings are bad for page readability. Another issue we need to consider is how the heading will be displayed. Heading 1 (h1), means larger font size in this case it is recommendable to have less than 7-8 words in the heading, otherwise it might spread on 2 or 3 lines, which is not good.

7.Keywords in the beginning of a document :

Placing keywords in the beginning of the document also counts, however, beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph – for instance if we use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.

8.Keywords in ALT TAGS :

Search engine Spiders don't read images but they read the textual descriptions in the tags, so if you have images on your page, fill in the tag with some keywords about them.

9.Keywords in metatags :

Placing keywords in metatags is important, especially for Google, Yahoo! and MSN as they rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Google, Yahoo or MSN, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not do any harm so better to have metatags in the page.

10.Keyword proximity :

Keyword proximity measures how close the keywords are placed in the text. It is best if they are placed immediately one after the other (e.g. “puppy food”), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have “puppy” in the first paragraph and “food” in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase “puppy food” without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

11.Secondary keyword :

Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, “web designing in Hyderabad” might have thousand times less hits than “web designing” but if you are operating in Hyderabad, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.

12.Keyword stemming :
In English we have words that stem from the same root.

Example :- ( dog, dogs, doggy)
(KISS, KISSES, KISSING)
(JOKE, JOKES, JOKEY, JOKER)

If you have “JOKE” on your page, you will get hits for “JOKES” and “JOKER” as well, but for other languages keywords stemming could be an issue because different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them.

13.Synonyms :

Synonyms are not taken into account when calculating rankings and relevancy in languages other than English. Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords is good for those sites developed in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well when ranking sites.

14.Keyword Mistypes :

When searching for information using a particular keyword Spelling errors are very frequent and if you know that your target keywords have popular misspellings or alternative spellings.

Examples for keyword mistypes

(Christmas and Xmas) (Diwali and Dipawali)

Targeting these misspelled keywords might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your website does not make a good impression, So it is better not to use these misspelled keywords in the content, but we can use them or try misspelled keywords in metatags.

15. Keyword Dilution :

When webpage is optimized with an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all the keywords and even the major keywords will be lost or diluted in the text. So don’t target more keywords in one single web page.

16. Keyword phrases :

Keyword phrases consisting of several words can be optimized in addition to keywords, e.g. “Keyword Analysis”. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (“keyword” and “analysis”) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.

Keywords Terminology

1.Keyword Density :
Keyword density refers to the ratio or percentage of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a web page. It is important for your main keywords to have the correct keyword density to rank well in Search Engines. Keyword density ratio varies from search engine to search engine. The recommended keyword density ratio is 2 to 8 percent. Keywords quality is very important more than keyword quantity because if we have keywords in the page title, the headings, and in the first paragraphs this count more. The reason is that the URL (and especially the domain name), file names and directory names, the web page title, the headings for the separate sections are more important than ordinary text on the web page . we may have same keyword density as our competitors web site but if we have keywords in the URL, this will boost our website ranking incredibly, especially with Yahoo search.

2.Keyword Frequency:
Keyword frequency means the number of times a keyword phrase or keyword appears with in a webpage. The more times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page, the more relevance a search engines are likely to give the page for a search with those keywords or key phrase.

3.Keyword Prominence :
Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page. It is recommendation to place important keywords at the start or near of a web page, starting of a sentence, TITLE or META tag.

4.Keyword Proximity:
Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. It is better to have keywords placed closer in a sentence.

Keyword proximity examples:

Example 1: How Keyword Density Affects Search Engine Rankings.

Example 2: How Keyword Density Affects Rankings In Search Engine.

In above example, if someone searched for "search engine rankings," a web page containing the first sentence is more likely to rank higher than the second.

The reason is because the keywords are placed closer together.

Levels of keywords

Keywords Levels are totally ౩త్య్పెస్

1.Low level keywords :

If the keyword competition (in Google) is <= 4 digits then it is considered as low level keyword. For low-level keyword we can optimize a website with in 3 months.

2.Medium level keywords :

If the keyword competition (in Google) is <= 7 digits it is considered as medium level keyword, For medium -level key words we can optimize our site with in 6 to 7 months.

3.High level keywords :

if keyword competition is above or equal to 8 digits it is considered as high level keyword .we can optimize these high level keyword in 1year.

keyword Analysis

1.Keywords for Search engine optimization :
Keyword is nothing but “on what we are searching for”.

Ex: - India temples, job opportunities, web development, Telugu movies, it solution, software training.

Key word should be “well define” and It must be a meaningful

Key Phrase: -Combination of 2 key words

Keywords are considered the most important in Search engine optimization. So it is necessary to see that the right keyword is optimized for your website. Choosing keywords seems easy at first but when you get into more detail, it might be a bit confusing to correctly determine the right keywords. But with a careful keyword research and thinking the problem of selecting the right keywords to optimize for a particular website can be solved.

Keywords are what search strings are matched against. when you start optimization, the first thing you need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of your web site best and that are most likely to be used by users to find you.

Choosing the right keyword is the first and crucial step to be successful in seo process, Before choosing keywords we need to see:

What the online population is searching for?

What are the keywords our competitors chosen?

What are the keywords that describe our website best?

If we fail in choosing the right keyword we will waste ours or our client’s money and time. after we have made a long and detailed list of all the important keywords that are searched by tens or thousands a day and If you have many competitors for that particular keywords we have chosen, chances are that it will be difficulty to overtake them and place our website among top ten results,

If we are not placed in the first page or on the second page or in the worst case on the third page of the organic search results, we will have very few visitors to visit our website. It is true that sometimes even web sites that are after the first 50 results get decent traffic from search engines but it is certain that you can't count on that.

We should not get discouraged if all lucrative keywords are already occupied; Low-volume search keywords can also be as lucrative as the high-volume ones and their main advantage is that you will have less competition with these keywords.

Some of the SEO experts confirm that with low volume search keywords it is possible with less effort and with in less budget we can achieve much better results than targeting for high-volume search keywords.

Before selecting a low volume or high volume search keyword we need to make an estimate about how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword.

2.Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize for search engines :
It is impossible to achieve constant top ratings for a one-word search string as the Web is densely populated with web sites; It will be a realistic goal when we achieve constant top ratings for two-word or three-word search strings.

we can include one-word strings in our keywords list but if they are not backed up by more expressions, it is waste of dreaming for high ratings.

For Example if we have a website about temples, “temple” is a mandatory keyword but we will be not successful if we do not optimize for more words, like “temples in India”, “temple visiting times”, “temple gods”.

we need to think broad when choosing the keywords, When we start optimization (seo), the first thing we need to consider is the keywords that describe the content of the web site best and likely to be used by users to find the website or service provided by the website. We should understand our users well and guess correctly what search strings they are likely to use to search our website. Synonyms can be taken into consideration.

For Example, in a dog site, “canine” is a synonym and it is for sure the users will use it, so it does not hurt to use it as a keyword in the content of the web pages.

But search engines have algorithms that include synonyms in the keyword match, especially in languages like English so do not rush to optimize for every synonym.

3.Website Keyword Suggestions Tools :
can help you to see how search engines determine the theme of a web site and what keywords fit into this theme. We can try Google’s Keyword Tool to get more suggestions about which keywords are hot to use.

Before choosing particular keyword or keywords or key phrase to optimize for Google or any search engine, we need to see relevancy of keyword to our web site and the expected monthly number of searches for this particular keyword or keywords or key phrase.

Some times narrow searches are more valuable because the users that come to our site are those that are really interested in our service or product. If we go on with the temples example, we might discover that the “festivals in India” key phrase also brings us more visitors because we have a special section on our web site where we give information or list of festivals in Andhra Pradesh. This page is not of interest for current visitors for temples but potentially attracting this niche can be better than attracting everybody who is interested in temples in general. So when we look at the number of search hits per month consider the unique hits that fit the theme of the website.

4.Effective Keyword Choice Strategy and Useful Tools :

The search engines will know the Web site theme while "crawling" the site pages; this is where the keyword power needs to be utilized. One correctly targeted keyword will produce a better overall search engine ranking than keywords just generally placed. The presence of that keyword placed strategically across the site is a factor in determining whether or not the web site is ranked high in a search on sites like GOOGLE, YAHOO and MSN. Many users will type broader search criteria into the search engines if they are uncertain of exactly what they seek. We should try to establish what keywords are most used in the context of the web site content and theme. Choosing keywords depend on the target audience's needs, and what keywords they will use to locate sites. Keywords will be relevant words and parts of phrases that relate to the site content. So what kinds of keywords should we use? For example: if you have a site that focuses on mobile phones, When any person is not aware of model and service provider and if he is searching for information like what are the best mobile deals available at present? Some keywords might be "mobile, mobile phone, phone tariffs, cellular," etc. If the user wants to find mobile phone sites that host budget phones, he or she may type the keywords mentioned above. If it is a movie information site, keywords could be "movies, film, movie, films, horror movies, Horror, sci-fi, action, cinema" This positioning and choice of keywords is crucial for a site towards SEO optimization.

5.Seeing in Overture which of the keywords that are related to our web site had most searches recently and optimize for those keywords is wrong because the fact that a particular keyword is often searched does not mean that this alone makes it a worthy target. If the competition for this highly desired keyword is tough, your efforts might be useless,