Custom Website Design

You’ve heard the catch phrase a million times, but what is “Link Pop” exactly? It’s simple really. A website’s link popularity, often called “Link Pop”, can be determined by the quality, quantity, and relevance of the other websites that link to its page.

Link Pop can be a tricky thing. In the good old days, search engines determined a site’s page ranking by the amount of times the keywords appeared in the text. Soon webmasters learned that if they squeezed an obnoxious amount of keywords into their site’s text, the site would eventually gain a very high page ranking.

Since search engines like Google gain users by serving quality webpage matches, they had to get smarter than the web developers. Google decided that instead of keyword match-ups only, page ranking would in addition be based on pages that had the most links to them. In theory, a website that has a bunch of other pages linking to it must be good, right? Wrong.

Webmasters would create these links any way that they could. “Link Farms” began developing and cluttering up the web. A link farm is essentially a page with tons of links on it, often in no particular order. These pages were virtually useless to web users, yet web designers were using them to gain better page rankings.

The thing is, search engines aren’t designed for web developers. They are designed for web users. Thus, when the “best” sites weren’t showing up first, Google had to try yet another strategy. This time links would be categorized. The best kind of link is an “Inbound Link.” An “Inbound Link” basically means another site links to your site. This generally happens because the webmaster of the site feels that the information on your site is valuable to his or her readers. Your page ranking will improve significantly if the website has a higher page ranking than yours and if there is obvious relevance between the two sites.

An “Outbound Link” means that your site offers a link to another site. “Outbound Links” don’t hurt your popularity if they are relevant sites, but they don’t necessarily help. Then we have “Reciprocal” and “Non-Reciprocal” links. A reciprocal link means that two sites connect to each other. A non-reciprocal link is a one-way link. Search engines are able to tell the difference between reciprocal and non-reciprocal links. Obviously non-reciprocal links are more credible because there is no direct benefit to the linker, and will thus increase your link popularity.

In order to create link pop for your website, you should focus on creating as many inbound non-reciprocal links as possible. One of the best ways to do this is through locating sites that are similar to your own and that accept links on their site from other related websites.

This can be a very time consuming process if done manually but there are many software programs out there that can make the job much easier and in less time then if you were doing it manually. One of the best programs on the internet to handle this process is called Backlink Submitter and it can be found at http://www.backlinksubmitter.com

Link directories are another great way to build ones link pop. Essentially, a link directory provides users with a collection of links organized by topic. There are thousands of directories to choose from. DMOZ and Yahoo! are the most heavily weighted. Directories exist solely to provide users with valuable resources. They are edited and organized by humans, so appearing in a directory can be a measure of a site’s worth. If your website is listed, it is viewed by users as a credible source.

Get your link in many directories as you can! There are two benefits. It will generate targeted traffic to your site, and it can improve your page ranking. When choosing a directory, look for the ones that allow you to add your own title and/or keywords. Choose directories that have less than 50 listings per page, and make sure the addition can improve your page ranking.

The submission process can be frustrating and time-consuming. The upside is, once your link is posted your link pop can shoot through the roof. Fortunately, we have developed a way to make the submission process painless. To learn how to efficiently submit your website to the top directories on the web, go to http://www.directorysubmitter.com

Do you really want visitors to have to figure out how to use it before they can get started? Do you want to write big help files and FAQs just to explain it to them? Of course not. Part of the power of the web is that it gives a consistent interface to all sorts of things. If you break this, then you’re making your site require some learning to be usable. In almost all cases, you should be sticking to the conventions that have gradually developed during the life of the web so far.

What are the Conventions?

The web’s design conventions are simple, but effective, to the point that you probably don’t realise they’re there most of the time. Here are some examples:

• Clicking a small picture will display a bigger version.
• The links on your navigation bar should all be internal links.
• Identity checks are done with a username and password system.
• Your logo should be a link to your homepage.
• Links go to HTML documents unless they’re clearly marked as a movie, PDF, etc.
• Things are bought by adding them to a ‘cart’ and then going through a ‘checkout’.
• There are many, many more.

Exceptional Circumstances.

The only time you should break the web’s conventions is when your website is different enough to others that it will be worth people learning a better way to use it. For example, when Google launched Gmail, the world’s first webmail service with a gigabyte of storage space, they introduced an interface that used Javascript to change entire pages without reloading. That broke the web’s conventions, but worked well enough that the technique caught on, and is now starting to develop new conventions all of its own.

Don’t get carried away, though, and start thinking you’re more important than you really are. Your great new product is very unlikely to justify you adding streaming video to your homepage – it’s more likely to just annoy people (far better to add a large picture of the video and a ‘click here to see our new product’ headline). Know your website’s limits – for the most part, you should try to make it work as much like other websites as you possibly can.

The ultimate test is this: if you sit an in-experienced web user in front of your site, can they use it without getting confused? If they can’t, then it’s back to the drawing board.