SEO - Linking

As we noticed earlier, the most important factor for getting a higher rank in the PageRank system is to have a complex and dynamic linking process (internal and external). There are several ways of making your link popular and having it appear on other sites:

Paying a specialized company - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Companies are a good option if you are willing to hand out a fair amount of money to rank higher in Google or other search engines, or if you find it to hard to take all the advices in this article into consideration for your site. This option could sometimes be a tricky deal, as SEO is always an unstable terrain and you might not get the desired result.

Link-Exchange -The most simplistic method after paying for the optimization is plain link-exchange. Basically it consists of two webmasters owning different sites, exchanging links and placing the counter-part’s link on their own site, thus increasing their rank reciprocally. You probably won’t have a lot of success if your site has a daily average of 10 visitors and you ask the Yahoo webmaster to exchange links, but it’s always a good thing to start low, exchanging links with similar websites (similar as in content and popularity). In time you will have your link spread in different places over the Internet and you can move up to exchanging links with more serious and popular partners.

Open directory listings - ODLs are special websites that index and sort other sites by category and content. The most important ODL is without a doubt the DMOZ Open Directory Project, where you can register your site for free and it will be checked for content. If the site is approved, it will be indexed in a category (for example “Commerce” or “Web Design”, etc.) where there is a chance someone will find your link and click it, or add it to their site.

All the people working at DMOZ are volunteers and their mission is to sort the good pages from the bad. They present the filtered pages back to the general public, focusing on high quality content for each site they review.

The information collected by DMOZ may be used by thousands of sites, and some of them may link to you. All these links score very low in Google’s PageRank but they are there and their numbers might add up to something that counts.

Post your link everywhere! - Whenever you have the chance, give out your link. If you spend time on a forum, place your link in your signature, if you write an article for a site, place your site’s link when signing it, etc. This is not only a good way to get your site clicked and get it popular, it also raises the chance of your site being linked to another one. Think about it, you’re posting on a forum with 2000 registered people, some of which are bound to have websites of their own or are managing someone else’s website.

Internal linking system - Use a well-balanced internal linking system. You can cross-link your most important pages in your site, so that the Google search engine sees them as relevant. If your website has hundreds of pages, the cross linking system makes it a lot easier for the Googlebots to index your pages quicker. You can also benefit from the use of the increased amount of keywords contained in the text links.