Get Others to Link to You
Posted by administrator on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
I found an interesting article about a man that put together a team that analyzed thousands of pages of teaching material to determine what is the most frequently referenced verse in the Bible [http://www.topverses.com ]. Some verses in the Bible are referenced more than others. The ones that are referenced the most show up first on his web site when doing a search. The premise of the web site is to quickly find the most “popular” verses in the bible quickly, and “popular” has been defined as what others reference the most. What do you guess is the most referenced verse in the bible according to this team's study? Go to their site and find out, it may not be a surprise to you.
The Internet search engines follow the very same pattern of determining what is more important or popular when displaying search engine results. The Google search engine's algorithms were founded on the premise that the more related links going to a site, the more important that site is. Other search engines have since followed the same premise. The more references or links there are to your site, the more important your site is in the search engine's eyes.
How do you know how many other sites are linking to your site? Google offers a tool that will give you a rough idea of what is indexed in its database. Go to google.com and in the search, type link:websitename.com (but with YOUR web site name instead of websitename.com) . I have found, however, that unless you have about 30 or more references to your site, Google won't return any results. Another way to to determine what sites link to yours is by viewing your web site's statistics' Referring Sites link.
Do you want to increase your search engine rankings? One of the best ways to do so is to ask others to link to your site. And you can return the favor by offering to link back to others. But remember that just any link or reference won't do. The referring sites must have something related to what you do, as sophisticated search engines also track the quality of the links and references. Another approach to getting linked is by having your site added to directories that link to sites similar to yours. One of the largest web directories on the Internet (and it's free too) is http://dmoz.org .
Better search engine rankings are not the only benefit to having lots of references. Recent studies show that about half of web surfers find new sites by following links or hearing about the web site from a friend. The more people know about your site, the better.