Link Popularity

Your key to high search engine ranking

It seems like more and more search engines are using link popularity as a part of their ranking process. Google certainly follows this method and uses it as its most important factor for ranking sites. Other big search engines like Altavista, Hotbot, MSN, Lycos, Northern Light, Inktomi, Excite are following by using link popularity as part of their their ranking algorithms.

What is Link Popularity?

Literally speaking, link popularity means the number of sites linking to your site. However, this does not mean that you should aim at getting thousands of sites linking to yours. However, if you are aiming to get a high ranking in the search engines, you need to know that the quality of links is more important that the quantity of links. If your site is linked to many popular sites then you are sure to get a higher ranking than if it is linked to hundreds of unpopular sites. The idea behind link popularity is that other sites will link to you only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So, if many sites link to you it follows that you are a popular site and therefore deserve a high ranking.
Look at link popularity as a way of getting more traffic to your site. So, by getting other sites linking to you, you are not only ranked higher in the search engines, you also have a large volume of targeted traffic coming to your site.With the competition increasing daily, getting a good ranking in the search engines is of utmost importance. If you really want a high ranking with the search engines, you need to follow a focussed linking strategy.

Let’s look at some of the linking strategies you can adopt:

1. Writing articles on your area of expertise
   Writing quality articles is a sure way of attracting visitors to your site. What could be easier than writing what you know about? So write a great article, find sites that are related to your area of service and submit your article to all those sites. If it’s a quality article it’s a sure bet. For e.g. we offer free website design and promotion tutorials on our site.
2. Reciprocal Links
   Asking webmasters of other sites to link to you is a good way of getting links to your site. Politely ask the webmaster (preferably using their name) to add your link to their site. You could tell them that you have added their link to your site, give them a brief description of what your site is about and how it will fit into their site. If you have a good site most probably other sites will want to link to you.
   Tip: A great way to find people who may be willing to link to you is to check your competition’s link popularity through a search engine. You can do this by typing: link:/www.yoursite.com or through an online tool such as linkpopularity.com.

Other link popularity strategies involve submitting to FFA’a or Free For All page and submitting to all the major and minor directories.Finally, every week or so, make a list of the new sites which you know have linked to you over the past week. Also, have a look at your site statistics and find out the new sites from which you have received traffic. Submit each of these pages to the search engines. This ensures that the search engines have spidered the pages which are linked to you.

Google Tips ‘n Tricks

1. Make sure all your important keywords should appear in your title, description, content and alt tags of your web page. This increases your keyword density and helps in boosting your ranking.
2. Write articles, give away freebies and make your site a quality site with fresh content. Sites will automatically link to you thus increasing your link popularity.
3. Here’s a cool trick to find out if you are listed in Google. Type this URL in your browser
   http://www.google.com/search?
   q=YOURDOMAIN+site:WWW.YOURDOMAIN.COM
   Google will return to you a complete list of all pages that lie on yourdomain.com that exist within the Google catalog.
   Example
   http://www.google.com/search?q=entheosweb+site:www.entheosweb.com
4. You can also find out how many sites that are listed in Google are linking to your site. Here’s the trick. Type this URL in the browser and watch the results.
   http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=YOURDOMAIN.COM
   Google will return to you the number of pages which link to your web site in addition to a listing of each URL.
   Example:
   http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=entheosweb.com

Google – submission, listing and ranking

Google seems to be rapidly becoming the most popular search engine. Submitting, getting listed and getting a high ranking in Google can get you a lot of traffic, usually even more than Yahoo. Google uses link popularity while ranking web sites which results in quality search results therefore making it a favorite among most web searchers.

• Submitting to Google
  You need to only submit your homepage to Google. It will automatically index the entire site. Don’t submit individual pages of your site.
  Tip: Google’s crawler Googlebot will follow all the links in your site. So make sure all your pages are linked otherwise some of your pages will not get indexed.
  Submit to Google here
• Getting Listed in Google
  Getting listed in Google is usually very fast. We got listed within 2 weeks and all our new pages are usually listed within a month. The time frame depends on their crawl schedule and how many other web sites are in queue to be indexed before ours. In our experience, Google usually lists a site within a month.

  Tip: Make sure your web site is ready before you submit it to be listed. Google will index your entire site, content and all. It takes keywords from the metatags as well as the content. You’ll find that Google will send you the maximum amount of traffic (in our case it is triple of what Yahoo send us – and Yahoo is supposed to be the #1 Search Engine), so time well spent on your web site will pay off in the long run.

  Tip: Google usually indexes sites during the 2nd week and lists new content during the first few days of the next month. We usually see our new content added on the 2nd or 3rd of the month. A safe bet is to wait for a month to see new pages listed.

• Ranking in Google
  Getting listed in Google is pretty easy but what really matters is your ranking. The best way to get a high ranking in Google is to have many sites linking to your site. As Google uses link popularity as its most important factor in ranking web sites, getting many sites to link to you is your best bet in getting a high ranking. Get quality links and increased visitor traffic with only minutes of submission efforts!

  Tip: Try to develop quality content which is different from what other sites are offering and you’re guaranteed to get a high ranking in Google. Think of specialized keywords instead of using generic terms. Using generic keywords would usually land you in the 30th or 40th page whereas using specialized, or a combination of keywords would get you in the 1st or 2nd page of search results. Think of writing articles that others have not written and you’re sure to come up in the first 10 search results. E.g If we were to write an article on web design we would probably come up in the 100th page of search results, whereas if we were to write on ‘Creating Swap Images in Fireworks’ we would probably come up in the first 10 search results.

Photoshop Tips & Tricks

Here is a collection of useful tips and tricks to improve your Photoshop skills.

The Amazing File Browser
Photoshop CS has an excellent file browser built into the application. You can access it from the File menu or by pressing Apple(Cmd)-Shift-O. It can do all a regular functions Finder does and much more.

Many don’t realize that you can actually delete/rename and move images, create/delete folders, etc. in this mini application with the benefit of having really big preview icons for your images to help your navigation.

But don’t you miss the old times, when you could mark the transparencies on your lightbox and easily arrange them for a selection?

Well, in file browser you still can do that. You can annotate and than sort your images by enabling Show Rank under the View Menu. Just under the images you will have a Rank field that can be used to annotate your images. Then, you can just sort the images by rank if you select the Sort menu and select Rank. Very powerful if you have to sort through hundreds of images.

Finding The Correct Layer Blending Mode
Most of the time when I’m trying to find a specific desired effect I would go through several layer blending modes.

This can mean a lot of clicking if done from the tiny drop down menu. I would have to focus to the menu to remember where I was.

The fastest and most convenient way to cycle through all the options without touching the drop down menu is by pressing Shift-Alt and + or -. To instantly jump back to normal I’d press Shift-Alt-N (Shift-Option-N). This way I can focus on the image and pay no attention to the drop down menu.

Radial Blur Center Adjustment
Radial blur is a great tool in Photoshop to dramatize speed, but what if your subject matter is not in the center of your image? If you apply the radial blur filter the speed lines will be incorrect (left image).

You may have noticed the little window in the Radial blur options panel, which demonstrates the type and amount of Radial Blur.

You may however never tried to click and drag the center of the effect in this window.

Just today a colleague of mine showed this feature to me, so I thought I’ll share it with you

Shift Drag A Layer
In Photoshop you can drag a layer from one document’s layer palette to another document window. However it will land in an accidental position. If you hold shift while dragging it will do two different things depending on the document size.

If the source and target document sizes are the same shift dragging will make sure your new layer in the target document is positioned in the same place as it was in the source. See the window in the middle as an example for dragging the Fleur De Lis symbol.

If the source and target document sizes are different the same operation will make your new layer positioned right in the middle of your target document. The right window demonstrates it.
uick Layer Effect Duplication
We already talked about how to copy sets of layer effects from one layer to several other layers.

But, what if you want to copy just one carefully composed layer effect to another layer without affecting the existing layer effects on the source (Layer 1 copy) or target layers (Layer 1)?

Simply drag the layer effect name from the source layer to just under the target layer.

The effect of this operation is not moving the layer effect as dragging without Alt (Option) would suggest, but instead it creates a copy.
Switch Horizontal And Vertical Guides
We’ve talked about how to make guides snap. Here is another quick bit to remember about guides. When you drag a guide and want to change it from horizontal to vertical or vice versa you can press the Option key (Windows= Start/Alt Option) to alternate between them.
Expand Canvas With The Crop Tool
Hold the Command key to prevent the Crop tool from snapping to the edge of your document.

Turn on full screen mode (by typing “F”) and then pull the cropping rectangle beyond the edge of your image to add space to your document (it will be filled with the current background color).