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Informative Articles

10 Free Business Resources I Wish I'd Known About When I Started Out
The impression that you need large sums of money to set up a successful (and profitable) website is totally wrong. Indeed, the longer that I do business on the Internet the more I find that there are numerous free resources out there that can be...

Disaster Proof Your Business
Copyright 2005 SharewarePromotions Ltd Who cares about which side of the toast hits the floor first? If it's your toast, and your floor, then the answer is probably you. But fate may have a lot more than a dirty breakfast in store for you,...

Goodnewsamerica.us Uses Open Source To Inform America
Atlanta, GA, July 13, 2004 - In the world of online news the competition can be tough. The newest addition to that world, goodnewsamerica.us , wants to be a player in this world and they intend to do it with Open Source software. They have chosen...

How Many Sales Have You Made After Your Advertising Campaign?
When you start your online business, you will go through a series of steps like: ==>Domain registration ==>Website designing and installing your inventory and order links ==>Advertising about your products or service Regarding...

What 97% Marketers Don't Know About Cheap Reseller Rights
I’m sharing one of my bad experiences with you, which I think will be useful for many people. While I made some mistakes, it sure made me learn a lot, which can be the foundation for success. "Learn from your mistakes", as your high school teacher...

 
Google
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.