Getting Ranked 4 of 5
Optimizing code and content is essential to get ranking with search engines, but another element that deserves attention is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of websites that link to your website. The difficulty with link popularity is that you have less control. Code and content is yours to change, but link popularity relies upon other sites that you do not have control of.
Link popularity is like a voting system. Each link to you counts as a vote and the more people that "vote" for (link to) your website, the more likely you are to win the ranking for your search terms.
This method of ranking websites can be manipulated in a variety of ways. In order to counter this, search engines take a lot into account when looking at link popularity. They look at the type of sites that link to you, the IP of the websites, how long the link has stayed live, the ownership of the sites, and the anchor text of the link. These are what tell search engines whether or not the links are real, relevant, and how much weight they carry.
How it's been done
Increasing the link popularity of a website has always been a priority to anybody looking to increase their rankings in the search engines. There have been many different ways to accomplish this including email requests for one way and reciprocal links, purchasing links from websites, participation in link networks, and trying to get inclusion in online link directories. These tactics tended to favor the larger businesses because they have a strong brand and more significant Internet presence than smaller businesses. For this reason, large sites like hotels.com where able to get top ranking for high-traffic keywords.
Hotels.com is also part of a link network:
At the bottom of the hotels.com page in grey text, they have a link network setup with other websites they own. This helps juice-up their link popularity and makes a big difference with search engine rankings.
A new way to get links
Links are still critical for achieving high rankings in the search engines. With the current era of social networks (web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it) it is now possible for smaller websites to get a large number of powerful links in a short period of time. The reason for this is that there are a lot more websites that can be used to obtain links. The biggest group of these is the 37.3 million blogs that are tracked by Technorati. If what you are doing around your website can create buzz in the form of blog posts, you will inevitably get an enormous amount of related backward links.
Kick starting the buzz
An additional way to get buzz is to use the social networking mediums to jump start your link popularity. Submitting stories, photos, and videos to digg, BlinkList, del.icio.us, flickr, MySpace and other mediums will help spread the word. Bloggers will see your submission on one of these social networking sites and might decide to write a blog post on your website, product, or service. Sites like Fruitcast were featured on these types of sites and their links increased as a result of hundreds of bloggers writing about it.
With all the links created through buzz, Fruitcast ranked high for terms on Google such as "podcast advertising".
In the same fashion, flickr was ranked on the top for "photo sharing". Another factor that contributed to flickr's rankings was all the links they got from people with flickr picture widgets on their blogs.
Box.net is another example of achieving high ranking via the links generated through the blogosphere. Their keywords were "online storage".
These examples should provide you with insight as to how to leverage the new mediums that are at your disposal. You can not only get the word out on your website, product, or service, but can also generate tons of links that will help with your search engine ranking. The old methods will still work and can be used, but the new methods are less laborious and can make a lot of noise for you. If your product or service is worthy of "buzz", take advantage.
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