Power Linking Aids Search Engine Ranking

This topic is, more or less, the whole mantra concerning linking, and it was Jack Humphrey who made it popular, whom many call an expert in the field. It covers what is involved, especially in reciprocal linking that is responsible for incoming links. The catch here is when we touched on the subject earlier we said what counts is what points at your site when your site is being visited by search engine spiders, and when more links are pointing at your site, its rank will definitely improve. However, there are experts like Jack Humphrey who say that it is also possible to get much traffic from what they call “power linking” than the search engines alone, even if most webmaster could believe search engines are the primary source.

It is not very difficult to see where these experts are coming from and they are advising webmasters, even if it is important to pay attention to search engines’ ranking, they are not the only source of traffic, and good links could generate as much. Why this makes sense is visitors travel through links, because links are meant to grab their attention, and in fact, what takes place on the search process for the most part is going through a web of links, and search engines are mostly an entry point and one comes back to them when there are no more good links on what they had visited so far, not bearing good leads anymore. Especially, if what a site is doing is popular, everyone involved in that category will direct visitors to it, and this is true for example in case of sites that are selling or offering software, or good content in a form of articles or ebooks.

This will again bring us to “content” that we talked about earlier, which is becoming more relevant, because search engines are giving more attention to sites that have regular fresh contents. It is not only a way of telling that a given URL is not deadbeat, it makes their effort worthwhile if they tend to sites that are actively pushing new content at their visitors, a hot issue that should be taken into consideration. And those who are trying to have fresh content on a Web site regularly know what the difference is, and to find out firsthand it is definitely worth trying, putting content on a Web site.

To come back to “power linking”, what is always recommended is to link with sites that are doing more or less the same thing, of course, by shunning away from those who will short-sell what a particular site is doing, those who are direct competitors. Wandering away unnecessarily from one’s particular field does not have a payoff; it could in fact trigger being penalized, because the spiders will check out the relevancy of every link.

Google gives rank to sites from 1-10 and one of the criteria they are using is link popularity, flanked by content. The experts advise that linking with sites that have higher ranks will always add to the rank of a starting out site and it gives a staying power for existing ones. Using the Google tool bar enables tracking the rank of a site. And after working on the link popularity of a particular site, most sites could see their rank improved within two to three months, and the process of working on link popularity is sheer hard work where webmasters, by using some of the earlier mentioned techniques will have to work at it manually for the most part, but there are software products that can automate the process. However, from experience, sites tend to be more responsive to those who visit each site they want to link to, and fill out the form they provide. And there is no limit as to how many links will give that needed rank, but at least a site should be wired with one hundred links before trying to take a breath, and this figure coupled with good Web site content could guarantee a site a good rank and position, which will be translated into huge traffic.

Talking about content, another form of “power linking” that could add to the incoming link is what is called “rich keyword content”, where the “keywords” or the “title” a particular site is using should be sprinkled throughout the content systematically so that the search engines will stumble upon them, a trick that will do a good job as far as being found for those keywords and titles is concerned, and it could end up improving the page where the site will be shown, that is among the first 20 or so results.

Another proven method is, it is possible to mention the various pages, products, articles, etc. on the particular site in a form of a hyperlink using the URL for the most part when posting an article on a blog or any other Web site, like ezines, where those who read the content will go to visit in order to obtain more information, and the rest depends on what grabs their attention while visiting the main site. Yet, this will also be considered as an incoming link of the webmaster’s own making, because there is no way the spiders would tell the webmaster planted them there, as long as they are sewn into the content, (pasting the keywords only could result in being penalized) a small payoff for putting out a lot of content. The same goes if there is a lot of coverage by outside sources about what a particular site is doing, and that will jack up the rank.

Consequently, since the main source of business is traffic, if there are good “power links” in place, they could generate traffic that is equivalent to the search engines, yet the way to go about making “powerful links” generate more traffic needs, more or less, a full time devotion to what the particular site is doing, that is on top of what the reciprocal links can accomplish alone. But, it is mainly the reciprocal links that drive traffic to the site, yet an ongoing “power linking” effort using the above method also adds much to the rank, and as well as to the incoming traffic, because visibility counts a lot, as it attracts attention.