seoance

In order to optimize your search engine ranking you have to understand the basis of “link popularity” – that is, how search engines rank sites. Certainly, search engines use on-page criteria for part of the ranking. This means that your keywords, content and meta tags need to be optimized. But you can only go so far with that. If you have those things perfect, it only represents an “unfair competitive advantage” as long as your competitors don’t have theirs perfect.

Search engines are look at off-page criteria for their rankings. Generally, they assess the “quality” of a site’s content based on the number of impartial links that go to it. In general terms, the more objective sites that link to yours, the higher the ranking of your site. In this case, objective links might include links from industry directories, news publishers, analysts, etc.

This means that if you want maximum SEO, you’ll need to focus on your link popularity. Here’s a few tips on doing just that…

 Get yourself linked in major industry or internet directories (e.g. Open Directory Project).

 Invest in public relations. Public relations will result in press pickups and press pickups can result in links to your site – particularly if you focus on trade publications.

 Use article marketing. Write and publish articles relevant to your business and your site. Distribute the articles through article distribution services. In that way they get picked up by a variety of news or higher quality sites and, via your biographical information, they get linked back to your site.

On the other hand, do not invest in big link exchanges or focus too much on reciprocal links – search engines prefer one-way links as a measure of the worth of your site.

Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, Steps to Internet Marketing Success.

Technorati Tags: search engines, links, objective links, link popularity, web directories