Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Increasing your online popularity

Anyone who has a website wants it to be popular and ranked high on Google and other search engines. How to get there is not easy considering Google's complicated algorithm based system of ranking sites, but still possible if you are a mathematician. For the most part, Google uses both on-site and off-site factors to determine site ranking. Page rank is part of its off-site factors, which gives you a basic number ranking based on how 'popular' your site is. Defining what is popular is the tricky part and Google is relying less on page rank since it can be manipulated.

Google looks for inbound links to you site from a wide mix of sites, including nitty gritty details as what is the page rank of the web site linking to your site, what is the quality of the page that it is being linked to, what is the text around the linked word or phrase etc. Even the Title, H1 and META tags are looked at by Google in determining what your ranking should be. The key to increasing link popularity is to get links from quality sites and links on different pages of different websites where the content is similar to yours.

Some of the more common ways of doing this are link baiting, reciprocal linking or buying links from brokers, none of which are worthwhile in the long run. The best way to increase a site's popularity is using press release distribution, although it is also the most difficult, since the material has to be interesting enough for publications to want to write about it. Blogs and personal websites provide a natural style for press releases and are a great way to increase a site's popularity. Blogitive has a network of over 2,000 writers for this purpose, where you can submit a mini press release that will be picked up by writers for their websites.

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