Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet - Part 5 - Link Popularity - How to build it

By Tasos Vasilopoulos
Posted Sunday, August 22, 2004

Introduction
This article makes part of a series of 20 articles. The subject of this series is the creation and promotion of a website as a cost-effective method to establish a profitable home based business on the Internet. In my previous article, “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet – Part 4 - Pagerank - What is it - How it can affect the success of your business”, I have explained to you what Pagerank is and the reason you have to obtain and keep a high Pagerank for your web pages, especially your home page. In this article I will explain to you what “Link Popularity” is and why it is vital for your home business to work hard to build it.

Link Popularity – how to build it

Building the link popularity (LP) of your website is the method you have to implement in order to start receiving well-targeted visitors without investing any money at all, but your personal time and effort. The more time you invest, the more quickly you will receive the results of your work.
Link popularity of a web page is the sum of all the incoming links to this web page.

Incoming link for a web page is a link from another web page to this web page.

Outgoing link for a web page is a link from this web page to another web page.
A strong link is a link from an important web page, with theme similar to the theme of your web page and with the right linking text, which must include the keyword of your web page.
Let us assume that the theme of your website is “home based business” and the keyword of your home page is “home based business opportunity”.
There are some rules that you have to take in consideration while building your LP:

· Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to FFA pages.
Free For All (FFA) web pages are web pages where you can post a link to your web page, giving your email address in exchange. Theoretically the owner of the FFA page builds a nice list of email address to use in his email campaign of selling his product and you get more exposure for your website and another link to add to your LP. But, the truth is that few people give their working email address to such pages. Instead they keep a “trash” email address they use in such circumstances. Also, these FFA pages include a links management system that takes out old links to make space for new links. This way your link may disappear in a few hours. Plus, there are so many links in an FFA page that their strength is virtually insignificant. And finally, Search Engines keep a note for websites that receive links from FFAs. If the percentage of your incoming links from FFA pages becomes a significant part of your LP, then they may “ban” you, they may take you out of their listings. And here ends your online business adventure for this website of yours and the domain name you use.

· Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to Guestbooks for the same reasons as above. You will get some links irrelevant to your theme and mostly you will risk to get “banned” from the listings of the Search Engines.

· Never try to fool Search Engines by inserting links to Link Farms.
These web pages are the worst danger of all. Link farms are web pages composed only from links. There are websites with web pages only of this kind. They have a good “page rank”, but they represent the biggest danger for your website. Keep away from them.

· Never try to build your link popularity by purchasing links from companies that “sell” them to “help” you increase it.
There are companies that offer links to you in exchange of money. You pay $100 and get 50 “good” links. Do not trust them. Even if the links are “clear” (no FFA, no Guestbooks, no Link Farms) there are good chances that they come from irrelevant websites and that they come from pages with hundreds of other links also, so their importance to your LP is questionable.

· Keep your LP focused.
Try to get reciprocal links from websites of similar themes. Do not spread your links to many categories. Getting 100 links from websites about traveling won’t be as effective as getting 15 links from websites about “home based business”. Plus they will cost you in time. Take in consideration that the process of requesting one reciprocal link may need half an hour to completed. Just to request the link. Which means find a website of similar theme, exam its links exchange procedure if any, create the link in your pages and upload them and finally, communicating with the webmaster of the other website to request the link.
I know of websites that have a Pagerank of 4 and 50 incoming links, yet they have a better position in the listings than websites with the similar keyword, a pagerank of 6 and 200 incoming links.
You can see the incoming links of a webpage using Google toolbar (see Part 4 - Pagerank - What is it - How it can affect the success of your business).

· Start building your LP by exchanging links with relatively weak websites. When you have built a substantial quantity of reciprocal links, then start requesting reciprocal links from stronger websites.
The reason is simple. There are tools to check the link popularity of a website. This way you can examine if a website has a link popularity clear (no FFA, no Link Farms etc), effective (links from website of similar theme) and strong (many links, high Page Rank). So, if you go to a strong website asking a reciprocal links exchange when you are no one, probably the webmaster will reject your request. He has nothing to gain from it.

· Build your link popularity manually. Do not use programs to do that.
There is a category of programs that help you build your link popularity quickly. But there are some drawbacks in using such programs. Some of them visit automatically all the websites listed in the first 10 pages of the listings of the Search Engines for a specific keyword and collect any email address they found there. Also they collect the URL, the title and the description of each one of those websites. Then they automatically insert in your links structure links to those websites, using the data collected, and send an email to each address, requesting a reciprocal link exchange. But, the webmasters of strong websites examine other websites carefully before exchanging links with them. They do not risk making a bad neighbor. If they see a webmaster that exchange links with everyone by sending automated messages from a links manager program, then probably they will reconsider exchanging links with him. If you send him a personalized message, making a nice comment about a specific topic in his website, he will understand that you are a serious webmaster, who select and examine the websites to exchange links with and you are building your LP with caution. And he will accept the reciprocal linking.

· Build the LP of other web pages of your website also.
Do not focus only on building the LP of your home page. If you interlink properly the pages of your website, a strong link to an internal page of your website can give the most of his power to your home page. If you get strong links to some of your internal pages, then the strength of the LP of your home page will increase substantially. This is a good reason for improving your website by adding pages with useful content to your visitors. These pages will attract links, which will add to your LP. They will also attract visitors, who may become your customers and co-workers.

Also there are some tips to take in consideration while building your LP:

· There is a way to insert efficient links to FFA pages
When you will have more than 300 incoming links then you may try and spot FFA pages that do not have many links and do not recycle their links often. There you can add your link
Take care your links from FFA pages not to overcome the 10% of your entire LP, otherwise you risk to get banned from the Search Engines

· There is a way to insert efficient links to Guestbooks. Find a few of them that have a good Page rank and insert your link. But keep them few, otherwise your website may disappear from the listings of Google.

· Using a link manager program won’t harm you, as long as you communicate personally with strong websites asking to exchange reciprocal links.
Take in consideration that,

o You can rent links from important websites of the same theme.

o You can buy links (ads with your link in them) in important websites of similar theme that will give you strength and visitors.

o You can submit to smaller Search Engines

o You can submit to local Search Engines and Directories.
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Next article in the series “Achieving financial freedom with Network Marketing on The Internet” :
Part 6 - Design the structure of your website

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About the author:
Tasos Vasilopoulos is a successful Network Marketer on the Internet as Group Leader of SFI Marketing Group. His main method to promote his home business on the Internet is websites properly optimized to obtain a good rank in the listings of the major Search Engines. Get his ebook with an in depth analysis of all the steps of his method and find more resources on proper domain registration, effective website design and search engines optimization in his website at (http://www.netincome.gr).