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As one of the most important ranking factors on todays modern search engines, link popularity starting to gain public exposure, the misinformation about what link popularity is and what it isnt also starting to grow. Everyday thousand of new webmasters jump head first into their first search engine optimization project after reading a few SEO forum posts or news articles.

Unfortunately these new webmasters have only a partial view of the search engine optimization process and link building that will actually produce lasting results on the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. The key I would like to emphasize here is achieving and maintaining lasting results. If your want your website to do well on the search engines even 5 years from now, its imperative you play by the rules and gain as much understanding about safe and effective link popularity building as possible.

Considering the sophisticated ranking algorithms used by especially Google, its very easy for inexperienced web masters to do irreparable damage to their sites by using spammy on-page optimization and link popularity building techniques that Google frowns upon. The real problem is, most of these search engine fooling tricks or sometimes referred to as black hat SEO techniques are not even known to new website owners.

Straight answers on link building methods that can hurt your ranking In this article I would like to shed light on some of the link popularity building techniques that will produce very limited results or worse will get your website banned on Google.

Before we start, I would like to introduce you to some basic concept about link popularity. A link in its simplest terms is a connection from one website to another. You can read more about web links on World Wide Web Consortium website. Search engines use the number and relevance of links to a website to measure its popularity. Therefore it naturally follows, the websites with the most links and the most relevance of those links will come out on top of the search results. Well, as I will reveal below, there is a whole lot more to links than you can imagine.

The risks of link building mistakes Since the link popularity building methods below have varying degrees of negative effects on your search engine ranking from no effect to an outright ban by the search engines, I will place a Danger Score next to each of these techniques to better illustrate the risks associated with each method.

A Danger Score of 10 will most likely result in a search engine ban while a Danger Score of zero will have little or no negative effect. Please also keep in mind Google, Yahoo and MSN have different levels of link spam tolerance. Google clearly leads the way in weeding out link spam and is much more vigilant in defending its search results against sites using link popularity building methods listed below.

Lets start by listing some of link popularity techniques that will not get you brownie points on the search engines.

The weakest links in link popularity building are:

1. Website links in forum posts signatures used to be a favorite method a few years ago to gain link popularity in a short amount of time. Although contributing to community forums is a great way to get your site noticed by other forum members, its not an effective link popularity building method anymore if you try to rely solely on a website link in your forum post signatures. (Danger Score:0)
2. Blog comment spam involves posting comments to blogs with a hyperlink pointing back to a website using a well targeted anchor text. This link posting method usually automated with the use of scripting languages and bots. This is a very popular method used by many sites peddling porn, pharmacy and many other products. Dont get discouraged posting blog comments if you have something worthwhile to say, you can only get yourself in trouble if you over do it by adding a large number of links or try to automate comment posting. (Danger Score:7)
3. Guestbook posting spam is very similar to blog comment spam. The guestbook posts are sometimes automated and if there are a large number of these links identified by search engines pointing to your website, it can results in a ranking loss or a ban. (Danger Score:7)
4. Large number of inbound links from no Page Rank or low Page Rank pages can send a sign of low website quality or link manipulation to Google. Although the Google Page Rank is not as important as it used to be, nonetheless it serves as an acid test for minimum site quality. Its becoming harder and harder to find new websites with a high Page Rank score as Google updates its Page Rank less frequently. (Danger Score:2)
5. Large number of links from the same C class IP block indicates the website is most likely involved in inbound link spamming. Since class C IP addresses use the first three octets to identify a network, the search engines substantially reduce the link popularity score being passed from one website to another in the same network. A large number of inbound links from the same class C IP addresses also suggest the use of the same hosting company or web server. (Danger Score:8)
6. Large number of links from unrelated sites suggest a link manipulation scheme since the website may lack unique content to attract links naturally. This type of scenario can often be observed in new websites involved in indiscriminate link exchanges using link exchange networks whether its automated or manual. Its inevitable you will have some low quality unrelated links pointing to your website, but if the majority of inbound links are unrelated, you can quickly find yourself in a lot of trouble. (Danger Score:7)
7. Link farms and web rings are setup with the sole purpose to manipulate link popularity by using a central database, automated scripting and a network of websites. This method is usually beyond the reach of the average webmasters as it takes technological savvy and a large number of servers and other resources to execute. (Danger Score:10)
8. Interlinking your own websites is a similar linking scheme to getting links from the same C class IP block, but in this case the WHOIS website registration information may be also used by the search engines to link the owner to all the websites involved in the link network. (Danger Score:8)
9. Co-op Ad networks such as the Digital Point CO-Op Ad Network are used to automatically interconnect websites involved in the network by inserting a small piece of code on their web pages. Every website participating in the network has to be validated first before joining the ad co-op. Google recently took a much harder line against sites using these type of link networks and the risks of getting banned has increased. (Danger Score:9)
10. Paid links is a very controversial subject in the SEO industry, since Google itself is making most of its revenue from selling small text ads next to its search results and other web services. As long as the paid links remain under the radar of the search engines the link popularity boost can be very significant to a website. Google is using both human power and automated tools to detect paid text links. When a website it identified as a known seller of text links, the link popularity benefits are no longer passed on to the target website, while the website owner continues to pay sometimes astronomical monthly fees for the text links. (Danger Score:2)
11. Automated link exchanges using server side scripting and databases are still popping up as the lure of easy and fast link popularity building attracts thousands of new website owners. As the saying goes If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In most cases automated scripts are used to execute the link exchanges and they usually leave a very large foot print. The search engines can easily identify the websites involved, and punish them accordingly. The automated link exchange services using server side scripts are sure way to loose your search engine ranking or get your site de-indexed by the search engines. (Danger Score:8)
12. Identical anchor text used in a large percentage of inbound links are unnatural and can be picked out by the search engines very easily. When linking occurs naturally people use all kinds of different anchor text to link to a website. When the same anchor text is used in a large number of inbound links, its a sign of someone trying to manipulate the inbound links and the search results. (Danger Score:5)
13. Run of site links are placed in the footer or side navigation of a website that is repeated on every page using a server side include or other HTML scripting method. Run of site links can also suggest the use of paid text links to the search engines. (Danger Score:4)
14. 3 way link exchanges occur when a website is invited to participate in a link exchange, but the inbound link is placed on a third website participating in the link exchange. Despite what many people think, three-way link exchanges can be easily identified by search engines and if there are a large number of these types of links are present, it can result in a ranking drop or ban. (Danger Score:3)
15. Low quality directory links could give a decent ranking boost to a website a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Inbound links from brand new, template based general directories are not going to result in a link popularity increase for your website. These new directories are a waste of time and money to submit to. If you want to submit to well established, older directories, please visit our internet directory list page. (Danger Score:2)
16. Inbound links from sites which are heavily optimized without contact information, phone number or a physical address imply a website that was created with the sole purpose of getting higher ranking in the search results and/or pass link popularity score to other websites. Most of these websites dont have any real products or services to offer, they are sometimes also used by SEO companies selling permanent text links for a fee or used to place their own clients website links on them. If you cant find contact information on the web site, only a web form, its most likely a low quality resource. (Danger Score:1)
17. Inbound links from new sites under 1 year old will not pass as much link popularity score as older domains. The fact is Google favors old websites in its search results especially for very competitive keyword terms. (Danger Score:1)
18. Inbound links from affiliate or Google Adsense sites are relatively poor links due to the fact these sites contain very little unique content. Most of these site solely exist to generate ad revenue from Googles Adsense program, or affiliate relationships.(Danger Score:2)
19. Inbound links using Javascript or other redirect methods are sometimes used by unscrupulous webmasters creating a perception of a fair link exchange with new webmasters. The problems is, most search engines can only follow static links to your website and therefore any type of redirect to your website will not result in link popularity vote that can be recognized by the search engines.(Danger Score:0)
20. Adding too many links too fast is a sure way to get noticed by the search engines for the wrong reasons. Except in some special cases when a website gains a lot of public exposure and links due to a TV ad, website blog or other forms of advertising medium. Inbound links appearing too fast especially from unrelated websites can result in a ranking drop or complete ban. Slow and steady, natural link building is the name of the game. (Danger Score:5)

In Conclusion Search engines are much more sophisticated than people give them credit for. Avoid damaging your web sites link reputation on the search engines by staying clear of the above link popularity building methods. Fixing link popularity building mistakes is hard work and can take a long time to correct. Before you start your search engine optimization project, learn all you can about effective and safe link building methods that will guarantee your web sites long term success.

Joel Katona is the founder of Trendmetrix Software a full service SEO Company and the architect behind SEO Studio a leading SEO Software. Don't forget to check out his free step-by-step SEO Training guide. For more timely website promotion tips and search engine optimization advice please sign up for his free SEO Newsletter

You have decided that hiring an SEO firm is a good idea for your website and your company, but around every corner is a firm, or individual, pretending to know all there is know on the subject. There are scams, black hat practices and frauds everywhere. It seems as if there are more of those than of genuine SEO experts.

How can you tell the difference? The answer is simple. Ask the hard questions and gauge their answers.

What type of Search Campaign does your firm prefer?

Ask the company if they do Paid Search or Natural Search optimization. The major differences are, a paid search should include a huge variety of key phrases, even numbering into the hundreds. A Natural Search is much narrower and focuses on a small number of effective key phrases. Your SEO firm should be able to do to both.

The SEO firm will set up a Paid Search campaign to gauge which keywords or phrases are targeted the most as regards your site and then they will focus their efforts on those select keywords or phrases for the Natural Search campaign.

Unfortunately, many times, firms skip the Paid Search Campaign because it is more profitable for them. In a Paid Search Campaign, much of the client's money will go to Google or Yahoo to pay for the campaign, leaving little for the firm, itself.

The only time a firm should skip the Paid Search phase is if the client's site is a narrow niche that has only a few, well targeted keywords or phrases that are appropriate to that site.

Not only should the potential firm be willing to perform both tasks, they need to make certain that the keyword or key phrase campaign is in keeping with the goals of the website. If the client's goal it to generate leads, then the keywords and phrases should reflect that goal. If the client's goal is to generate sales, the campaign should keep that in mind.

Does your firm perform SEO copy writing?

SEO copy writing is the creation of website content that is written to attract the attention of search engines. If you have seen a site with a phrase that is repeated over and over, you have likely seen a page that has been created by an SEO specialist.

The downside is these pages do not go over well with humans.

The key is finding a happy medium, which is keeping your keyword and/or phrase density to about 17 to 20 percent and to make the sentences and paragraphs sound natural. Because the algorithm changes frequently for search engines, this will keep any SEO firm busy by making frequent site changes to keep up.

Your chosen firm should not be shy about making site content changes without loosing focus of your over all business goal.

What about link building?

This process is extremely important to raise rankings with Google, who gets about 65% of all search business, and somewhat important to Yahoo and MSN, the next two most popular search engines.

Make certain your potential SEO firm engages in sufficient link building efforts. This is done by creating links to your site in a number of ways: blogging and social site are just the beginning. A good SEO will write articles and post those articles to sites such as ezineArticles.com or Helium.com. This creates a link back to your site. These articles can then be posted other locations, such as blogs. If the system works well for you, someone else will find the article and post it to their site or blog, giving you an unsolicited link back to your site.

The problem is this method takes a long time (sometimes 2 to 3 months) for real results to be seen. The solution is to purchase links. Care should be taken to link to only reputable sites and not to link farms which sell links simply to make money for themselves. The more inbound links your site has, the better your rankings will be.

What keyword or phrase will be used to show my rankings?

It is a fact that if you do a search for an article by that article's title, it will show up as #1 in page rankings. If you search for the page's URL, it will be #1 because there is only one site with that URL. The real test of your SEO firm is if they can raise your rankings via a keyword or phrase that is a popular key word or phrase and not something so narrow that you are the only one who will have that particular search phrase. What are the odds that someone will do a search for "Four Questions You Should Ask Your Potential SEO Firm Before Hiring Them?"

The firm should focus on the keyword or phrase that will accomplish what your company is hoping to accomplish.

Karen Vertigan Pope writes for Ciniva Systems, an award winning Virginia web design company. Ciniva specializes in web design and SEO. Ms. Vertigan Pope is the Project Support Manger for Ciniva Systems and heads the SEO Department at Ciniva Systems.

It is important to understand what a link building service can provide for you if you are thinking of hiring these services from a company. There are also a few things you should require before buying link building services. You don't want a link building service that has a bad reputation or uses unethical methods for sending out your site. This will give you a bad reputation too.

Link building is the process of creating links to your website through other websites. These links will be inbound to your business. For instance, you might have several articles written about your company that have links embedded in the text that the reader can click on that will take them directly to your site. You might have images on other sites that are direct links to your website also. Link building helps increase traffic to your website and is very popular today.

A link building service is a company you can hire that will take care of link building for you. They will write articles relevant to your products or services with links included that take readers to your site. The articles will be posted throughout the web. They will provide link building services throughout the Internet. These services are designed to provide maximum exposure to your business and services that you provide.

There are several points that you should take into consideration before you purchase link building services for your website. You should only purchase links through websites who offer total integrity with their content. Your anchor text should be varied and you should purchase non-keyword links. You should avoid site wide links and automated link spamming. This can give your business a bad name. Image links and ALT text is important and you want a company that offers this.

Many link building services are offered through SEO companies. When you accept these types of services you should expect the popularity of your site to increase, in return increasing the page rank of your site too. Most of the links are built up through other relevant and authority sites. Most companies will do the work of finding the relevant sites that offer their sites as a resource to place a link for your business on.

The primary purpose of link building is to make your business more popular by creating many inbound links into your website. This process will increase the traffic to your site and in return it will improve your site ranking through Alexa. Increasing the site ranking can make your site more valuable if you are interested in selling the domain but it can also improve sales for your business when the traffic increases substantially.

A link building service is designed to improve your website by increasing the traffic to your business website. You should be sure the links you purchase are on websites with quality content and practice total integrity. You don't want links created on your website through a site that has been blacklisted by search engines for spamming or uses unethical methods for sending out your links. Be sure you agree with their methods and you like the content.

Derek Rogers is a freelance writer who represents many UK businesses. For Link Building, he recommends Impact Media Ltd, one of the UK's leading specialists of Link Building Services.

When you look at search engine optimization for your website, keep in mind that search engine robots look at how your pages are linked together and how your site is linked to other sites. When you place a link on your site, this is an OUTBOUND LINK; the site of the link benefits.

INBOUND LINKS is what the search engine robots look for; you want sites of related content and high traffic to place a link to your site on their site.

The fastest way to accomplish this is to write informative articles that link back to your site and have them published on other websites. The signature line in your forum posts that include your website address create links to your site as well as directory listings.

The more pages of VALUABLE CONTENT you have on your site, the more inbound links you can have pointing to your site. The exception to this is "Free For All" (FFA) pages which are also called "Link Farms" which can have the opposite effect and get you banned from search engines.

Find out who is linking to your site by using the three advance search commands:

link:www.yourdomain.com

inurl:yourdomain

allinurl:yourdomain

There are several Link Popularity Checker online; the Webmaster Toolkit and Marketleap has two of the most reliable.

Search engine optimization is a combination of four major factors, your keywords, your keyword optimized content, submissions to search engines and inbound links. Each one of these factors are important and together as a unit they can give you good search engine rank.

Find out what it takes to get better Search Engine Optimization Results

Discover new ways to get massive amounts of traffic with a little extra effort and Monetize your Website

As a webmaster ranking in the search engines in order for people to find you is one of your major concerns. Knowing how to get More Backlinks is one of the solutions. What is really nice is free backlinks.

With a good backlink strategy you can get to #1 on Google. I know because I have done it. Not once, but many times. There is only one problem...it takes WORK! If you are not willing to do the work or have the work outsourced then forgetaboutit.

Everybody wants #1 on Google. Knowing how to collect backlinks will help get you there. The first page of Google will put you in easy reach of your customers. If you are a webmaster you can do it yourself. If you are a business owner I strongly suggest that you outsource.

Many web owners struggle to rank up their pages and often this is because they do not fully understand the power of backlinks.

Backlinks, are one-way links. Reciprocal links are when links are exchanged between two websites. Backlinks get more "juice" from the search engines and play an important part when assigns page rank.

Now the thing is, you don't want just any kind of backlink, you want good high quality backlinks. There are a lot of sites that will sell you backlinks...DON'T. Most of those sites will raise a red flag with Google, and have the "Big G" looking sideways at your site. Free is the key. Free backlinks!

Do not try to manipulate Google. Be safe and do it right. When you seek to get more backlinks you must ensure that they meet the standards of "Big G" and the other search engines. Main thing...make sure the links are relevant to your site, and come from a high ranking site. PR-2 or better. Authority sites such as .gov or .edu are great for backlinks.

There is a very simple method to get high quality backlinks everyday. No begging, no cash required, just fifteen minutes a day will have you over time tons of quality free backlinks and catapult your site to the top of the charts.

If you see the power of quality backlinks and want to know more on how to get then in the thousands then click below for more information. Get More Backlinks.

Recently I was putting together a marketing test for a website that I run that involved placing up advertisements seeking accountants to work with my real estate investor clients. Ultimately, what I was looking for was accountants that were willing to have me list them as a local accounting resource for my real estate investor clients and visitors to my website in exchange for them linking to my real estate investor website from their accounting website.

While I was putting together this link building marketing test it occurred to me that many accountants may not realize the importance in having other websites linking to them and a couple strategies for getting more websites to link to them.

First, why would an accountant want to have other websites linking to their accounting website? Well, two major reasons: improved traffic and improved popularity.

Let's start with improved traffic. How does a website improve their traffic from other websites linking to them? It's pretty simple really: visitors from website A click on the link and are taken to website B.

It is pretty easy to see how having links from a dozen or two dozen other websites will help get you trickles of traffic coming to your website from links you have on their website, but how does it improve popularity?

Search engines, Google being a prime example, give credit to websites that have incoming links. The more links, the more credit you get. From a consumer's perspective, wouldn't you--in almost all cases--want to be shown a website that is more popular than others when you are searching for that website? If ten other people have linked to a website and said, this is a good website, doesn't that make it more likely that you would want to see that website too? Well, that's the basic idea.

The more people that link to you, the more votes you have received from the web at large and the more likely search engines are to show your website before others when people are searching to find you.

So, accountants should spend at least part of their marketing time building up links to their website to improve both web traffic to their website and popularity--which ultimately begets even more traffic.

James Orr is a professional real estate investor and marketing expert.

He runs over 300 websites including a marketing blog about holding your marketing ruthlessly accountable to results at http://RuthlessAccountability.com

Internet business is search based and your website must be available to your target audience if they search for it. This is the main purpose for which SEO services are in demand. Their main aim is to get your website in the top of search engine rankings. The process may include the keyword selection and optimization of those keywords. The keywords must relate with the theme and content of the website. It is important to get higher ranking in different search engines. But if you will see the bigger picture then you would realize that ranking depends on the search engine behavior and also on the promotion techniques adopted by the website.

Hence it is important to know those techniques of website promotion. And SEO services provider can give you some knowledge regarding major techniques for website promotion. In fact there are two major SEO techniques.

1.On page optimization

2.Off page optimization

On page optimization (keyword analysis and content analysis) is significant but at the same time off page optimization is equally important. It plays a great role in attaining good rankings in major search engines. There are various issues to handle in off page optimization. An SEO services company can make you learn about them. It is important to improve search engine rankings and and also to generate targeted traffic to a website. In off page you are not required to change anything in the website design or its layout.

Generally off page optimization in SEO services include the task like link building which is its most important part. It is the process of increasing back links of website by the way of reciprocal, one way and three way link building techniques. Directory submission is yet another off page optimization technique. It is the way of submitting websites in the directory so that it can get recognized by various search engines. This is a method of getting one way link and increasing traffic to the website.

Furthermore, articles can be utilized to get natural rankings in search engines. It can make your content popular in search engines and can attract more and more visitors. SEO services companies also promote websites through press releases.

Hence, choose off-page optimization techniques and make sure that your target audience finds your website if they are looking for it.

Naman Jain is an online marketing professional, Presently working with Rupiz Media, one of the leading online marketing company offering expert UK web development services and website designing solutions over the globe.