Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Marketers
No doubt you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – which states that 20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, and conversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only 20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs. There are...
Google's Secret Domain Name Registration Policy
I was reading a forum post by Willie Crawford who is one of my favorite Internet marketers. Willie brought up a point that Google may favor ranking domains that have longer registration periods. His source, a domain name registrar, stated the...
Hit Trees - Are They Effective?
I remember my first web site. While I have been in the computer industry for over 25 years, my exposure to the internet was very limited until a few years ago. My expertise was large computer systems and applications, as well as project...
The Do's and Don'ts of Launching a Small Business Website
Launching a new small business website is often a long and painstaking process. And for most small businesses, the endeavor rarely ends in success. The terrain is mapped with freelancers, firms, and consultants that don’t offer the same services and...
Try ‘Linking’ With Reality
I have been using the services of a wonderful facility, which has taken almost all of the work out of my ‘Linking Program’ (if you have a website that relies on Search Engine traffic, I really do hope you have one!). The facility is named...
Quick Introduction to Link Popularity
If you are new to Web site promotion, you might not have heard of link popularity before, but in some respects, it's the single most important factor for good ranking in search engines. Before covering link popularity, a brief overview of how search engines operate is in order.
Because of the vast number of files and documents on the Web, there is an inherent need for some method of indexing and searching for documents. Search engines and directories fill this need to varying degrees of success. Pure search engines differ from directories in that they do not use human editors to add to their directories; they use software to "crawl" through links in documents to find other documents to add to their indexes. Historically, these engines based the ranking of individual documents on factors such as keyword placement (where a keyword appears on a page), keyword density (how many times a keyword appears on a page), and the use of special HTML tags known as META tags. Because these factors were easily manipulated by Webmasters, a high ranking could often be achieved for pages of little or no value. New methods of ranking pages were needed to
achieve better results.
Then along came click tracking and link popularity. Click tracking is another topic in its own right, so that won't be covered right now, but the basis of link popularity can be explained in one sentence: The more sites that provide quality links to yours, the better. It's not really that simple, because there are different kinds of links and linking methods that affect ranking, but for an introductory article, it'll do just fine.
Basically, the algorithms, or rules, that the search engines use favor those sites that have a large number of quality links pointing toward them. You can think of it as a popularity contest. Page A has more links pointing toward it, so therefore it must be a more useful page than page B, which has no links pointing toward it. Because of this, building links with other sites is simply one of the most effective forms of promotion for your site.
About the Author
Alan is the lead developer for InfoServe Media, LLC (http://www.infoservemedia.com/), a Web development company that specializes in Web site design, hosting, domain name registration, and promotion for small businesses.