Thrudigital

There are many theories that explain various approaches to achieving high rankings in search engines, but only a few which explain methods that actually work. Basically, we can say that there are three main schools of thought: the first one is based on links, the second on content, and the third is a combination of the two. So these are the general practises: 1) you’re told to submit your websites into hundreds or thousands of directories. The concept isn’t bad, but the real situation is less than ideal. Often, this advice comes from people who own directories. It isn’t unusual to see some of them asking £50/year per submission. £50 is not a lot of money, but if there are 100 directories which you want to submit your website into, then it adds up, and there’s no real guarantee of success.

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Members of the second school say that it’s content which matters. Of course, without quality content, it’s very difficult (though not impossible) to achieve decent rankings. However, you can’t expect a site with good-quality content but no links to achieve good rankings.

So naturally we come to a mix of these two approaches. This is the golden middle-road, but there’s still something missing. Let’s imagine this situation: you created useful content, hundreds of pages which are really worth reading. You submitted your website into directories, and after time this starts to show results. You can see people coming from Google and Yahoo! coming to your site. What’s wrong with this strategy? Many free directories will become inactive after some time. A number of directories are born every day, but just as in life, not everyone succeeds. People will stop visiting and submitting, and eventually it is likely that the domain will expire and will not be renewed. All links will simply cease to exist, and as they disappear, your rankings (which were based on these incoming links), will start to worsen. You can easily make new submissions every day, but a new link never carries as much weight as an older link.

You can also hope that people will link to your content, and often they will, but you can’t tell when and you can’t tell how. In my experience only a small portion of visitors create links. First, because only a small minority of internet users have websites, and secondly, an even smaller proportion will have websites that are relevant to yours. Finally, a still-smaller proportion will actually be willing to link to your site. If we wanted to be pessimistic about it, we could also consider that few of these links will actually carry very much weight in Google. Free web counters are a perfect example of how to get links quickly and easily: You just need to tell people about your free web counter. Of course, I prefer to use Google Analytics, as it brings more comfort and usability than any free web counter.

Here are a few methods to summarise how to get free links quickly: first, launch a tool (it doesn’t need to be unique) and spread the word about it. You can even advertise it in AdWords. Before you start working on any such tool, make sure that people will want to use it. There is no guarantee, and it’s always risky. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Second, ask people for links directly from pages of your website. This is very simple, add a paragraph saying something like: “If you like this page, use this HTML code on your website…” Believe it or not, this actually works. You will achieve a few links this way and it takes virtually no time to add that kind of code to web pages. Third, create a quiz. It’s a perfect way of getting links because once people have completed the quiz, they can post a banner or text link saying something like “I reached 83% in some kind of quiz.” Again, it works perfectly. Moreover, you can get thousands of free and fast links this way

My conclusion is this: you have to make people want to link to your website. It’s nonsense to pay hundreds of dollars for submissions into directories if you can achieve better results faster and with a lower budget. All of the three methods mentioned above can work for any website, whether it’s dogs, kitchens, computers, cars or healthcare. Give your visitors what they want, and persuade them to want to link to your site.

Naturally, you may find other effective ways to achieve higher rankings in search engines. It’s really up to you.