Just a bit about search engine optimization.

Driving traffic to your web site is critical for online success. Yet how can you get your site known among the millions now jostling for position on the Internet? You can increase link popularity ratings in search engines.

What do we mean? Simply this: The best ways to increase link popularity are to seek out sites with content complementary to yours (“run in circles”), and then trade links that describe what you’re about (“scream and shout”).

Link popularity measures the number of links; link importance measures the type of external website linking to yours. The combination of these factors results in a “weighted” link popularity score that some search engines view as a more authentic rating than merely numbers of links. Link importance came about as a way to measure link popularity because spammers set up dozens of bogus free sites that linked to their main site. This unethical practice skewed the results until analysts got wise. Now the most reputable search engines don’t count free-site links at all.

The way to work this system is to understand the components of the computation, namely link popularity and link importance. Link popularity counts the number of links to your web site. Link importance evaluates the importance of the sites linking to yours. Computing these numbers together results in a weighted link popularity ranking that search engines contend is more genuine than measuring solely the number of links.

Link importance comes in for criticism from time to time, based on the fact that even though it’s computed mathematically, at some point a human makes a subjective judgment as to which sites are “important.” You may have 2, 500 devoted fans who think your film criticism site rocks their world, but unless one of their links is from Entertainment Weekly, you’re not going to increase link popularity.

So if your strategy is to increase link popularity to a certain level, then your tactics have to be to get noticed by other sites with online clout AND to get more links in total. Some ways to do this include:

2. Content is still King of the Internet, so put high quality content on your site. People will link eagerly if you’ve got the stuff they want. Use Search Engine Optimization by including keywords in your content so that people will find you easily.

3. Trade links with other sites. Choose sites related to your topic which have a high search engine ranking. Be sure to include a paragraph describing your site content to ensure more click-throughs, and ask your new online buddy to do the same.

* Boldly go to sites you’ve never seen before and trade links. Include a choice description of your site content to get more clicks and invite your new friend to do likewise.

4. Write a testimonial about how much you learned/gained from somebody’s site. Odds are high they’ll ask to lift up your comments, so be sure to request they include a link to your site.