Increasing site popularity by linking

One of the most frustrating things about having your own site is the seemingly arbitrary way that the search engines rank your site. It seems that no matter what you do, you can't really get to the bottom of how Google ranks you and decides how important you are in the Internet world. Google currently uses an algorithm that is so complicated that it's virtually useless for a layman to try to understand it, but since it is the most powerful search engine, it makes sense to try to work with it to build popularity.

Using a variety of on-site and off-site factors that decide just where you rank. Page rank is the score that Google gives a site as its worth or popularity on the Internet. But page rank itself is quite deceptive measure in itself. I have been blogging for quite a while now, on this and on my older blog, but for some reason, last month my page rank dropped, even though I was posting more regularly, getting some good inbound links and visitors. As consumers are understanding page rank, they are also getting around the system and so now Google is giving less importance to it as a way to measure a site's popularity.

One of the key factors that Google looks for is inbound links, especially inbound links from pages with a good page rank. It also bases results on the context of a link and where it is placed on a site, such as is it in a paragraph of text or just in a list of links somewhere on the sidebar or the bottom of the page. Title Tags are also studied, along with other SEO factors like H1 tags and META data. Contextual links with sites that have similar content is one of the key ways to increase page rank and link popularity.

There are lots of ways to increase link popularity, such as press release distribution, purchasing links from brokers, trading links with other websites and link baiting. The most effective method is press release distribution, where a company gives out information about themselves that is picked up with various publications. It is also one of the most difficult method of increasing links. Buying links from brokers is easy and quick but neither are results of the best quality nor are the links in context. Trading links was once quite an effective method but again the quality of the links and their placement is not guaranteed. Link baiting is an effective method of increasing popularity, but it is very hard to do, as it entails hunting for links. Connecting through high quality blogs is one of the most effective ways of improving link popularity, since blogs are filled with content that search engines look for. Blogitive has created a network of 2000 blogs, where companies can issue a web release that bloggers write about.