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captiva marketing_St. Louis
10805 Sunset Office Drive
Suite 207
St Louis, Missouri 63127

captiva marketing_Dallas
5805 Mapleshade
Dallas, TX 75252

Ph: 314-822-3656
Toll Free: 877-227-8382
Fax: 314-822-3734

What is Link Popularity?

Building algorithm compliant web pages is an important part of optimizing a web site, but without link popularity, these pages may still not rank high enough in the search engines to generate significant traffic. In order to get a site to rank very highly, a site needs to have link popularity. The amount of link popularity needed is dependent on the competitive nature of the phrases (for example, "coffee" is significantly more competitive than "commercial coffee maker").

The Link Popularity of a site is typically derived from the following factors:

• The number of web sites that link to your web site
• The link popularity (PageRank score) of the pages from which these inbound links originate
• The number of outbound links to other sites on the page in which your inbound link originates
• The topic of the site
• Whether or not the link is one-way or reciprocal (you link back)
• The anchor text, while not necessarily a factor in your site's overall link popularity is also important. For example a link with "XYZ Company" or "www.xyzco.com" will help a site's overall link popularity, but a link with the anchor text "XYZ Plastic Widgets" will do much more to help improve one's rankings for the search phrase "plastic widgets" as well as any search phrases with either "plastic" or "widgets" in them.

One also needs to consider that not all links can be read by the search engines. Links buried in frames, javascript, or pages not accessible to the search engine spiders provide no benefit from a link popularity point of view.

When implementing a search engine marketing program, enhancing a site's link popularity is often necessary. The link popularity of any given page within a site is typically related to the overall link popularity of the home page. This situation exists because most inbound links come into a site's home page. Part of the strategic process of optimizing a site is determining how this link popularity should be spread to the individual pages of your site based on the competitiveness of the terms that you are targeting. The other part of the process simply involves increasing the overall link popularity of the site and getting the anchor text for some of these links to match your targeted keyword phrases.

How do we identify potential links?
Enhancing a site's link popularity can be achieved in many ways, but it typically starts with reviewing the back links for those sites that are ranking well for your desired terms. The search engines allow us to see who is linking to every site and by researching this information, we can develop a list of potential sites from which we can request a link.

Typically, this list will consist of links from various directories, organizations, media, and partner sites, but it may also have links from informational sites that simply linked to a site for the benefit of its readers.

How do we enhance one's link popularity?
The most professional way to increase a site's link popularity is to publish interesting content and combine it with comprehensive PR and advertising programs. These campaigns will help inform people of the existence of your site and create the natural linking that is most desirable (typically, one way, on topic links, from powerful media sites.)

Many sites have had success by providing information or applications that other sites want to share with their visitors. "how to information", reviews, free downloads, or extensive, well-written research are common methods used to encourage "natural links."

Submitting technical papers to informational sites is another effective method to use, especially with more publishers looking for informative content to use on their own informational sites. It is important to optimize and publish these technical papers on your own site as well.

Other Link Building Methods Include:

Submitting to Directories – In addition to general directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory, there are typically a number of relevant specialty directories that can provide link popularity to a site. Some of these directories offer free listings, but most charge some fee and the quality of the link will vary greatly from one directory to another. When we do a link building project, we are typically able to identify a number of specialty directories that are relevant to our clients businesses.

Join Organizations – Companies that belong to trade organizations, sponsor charities, or exhibit at trade shows will often get links from these websites.

List in Buyer's Guides – Most trade publications tend to offer very few opportunities for enhancing one's link popularity because outbound links are typically buried very low within the site structure, configured to route through internal servers, or served up in frames. Still, sometimes opportunities exist in buyer's guides or sections that publish industry news. If so, we typically submit to any relevant buyer's guides and identify sites to put on one's press release list.

Ask Partners for Links – This may include suppliers, distributors, customers, sales partners or anyone else who has a reason to want to link to your site. We will often set up a "Link to Us" page to make it easy for these partners to link to one's site and often contact them with a request for a link.

Submit News to Informational Sites – If we identify any informational sites that are relevant, we will typically contact the Webmaster and request a link to our client's site.

Buy Links – In its purest form, this involves sponsoring relevant sites or placing advertisements on sites to promote your web site to a particular target market. In its least pure form, this would involve buying "text link ads" simply for the link popularity that it will pass onto your site.

Whatever method you choose, care must be taken as there is a fair amount of risk associated with buying text link ads and most sites that sell banner ads or sponsorships route the links through their own servers and pass on no link popularity to the site.

Trade Links – One of the most commonly used and abused methods of increasing a site's link popularity is trading links. Many sites have already created reciprocal linking programs whereby they exchange links with sites that sell complementary products or services. Historically, trading links was a common and acceptable practice, but it has been abused so heavily that it is now difficult to appear professional doing it.

The primary benefits of trading links are:

• Link partners will often structure the link text any way you desire.
• There is no direct cost aside from the time involved.

The negatives are:

• It is very time consuming as one must identify potential link partners, publish a link on their site, and then request a reciprocal link. These days many webmasters ignore reciprocal link requests so it often takes numerous attempts to generate even minimal feedback.
• It can detract from the professional appearance of a site as you must put links to other people's sites on your site. If we are going to engage in reciprocal linking, we typically create a Resources section and try to keep it relatively professional looking with only relevant links.
• The links often come from low ranking pages that have numerous outbound links on them and actually provide very little benefit.

We typically look for higher-ranking sites and then set up a link exchange system to handle requests from others.