Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am in the midst of creating a new web site and I am learning about meta tags, how to place them on your index page and the importance of well thought out keywords.
Now, when it comes to link popularity I am still in the dark. My impression is that I want quality links, possibly not paid for that link to my page. I don't want to use a program (since Goggle seems to not like this). So I am now assuming that I manually surf the net and try and link my page to as many as possible. Is that correct? How many links are enough? How do I know if they are considered a quality link or not?
SpinnerC
you got it right; the best and most valueable way of gaining "Page Rank" is by having links from other pages that have good Page Ranks themselves (the higher the better). You will find the tool to see each web sites Page Rank - the Google Toolbar - here: [toolbar.google.com...] You will also find tons of information about the page rank and it's inheritance when you do a site search here.
About META Tags there is interesting essentials in this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
the easiest way to gain link popularity is by writing to other site owners and asking them to exchange links.
when we are looking to exchange links we look at it from the point of view of the user:
* is the page we link to interesting for our visitor?
* does it fit in with the rest of the information in our site? (is it relevant?)
and perhaps the killer reason...
*would i link to it even if it didn't link back?
think of all the time you have already spent creating the best homepage you possibly can - don't spoil this effect by then linking out to every single site you can think of - you will only lose your own visitors' confidence.
and don't get too hung up on pagerank - which is google's own way of assigning importance to pages. try to get out of the "you have so and so much page rank - you must be a good link" way of thinking and concentrate more on the subjective quality and usefulness of the sites you link to and the sites you wish to exchange links with.
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the other really important thing at the moment regarding links is the anchor text - the words which they underline to link back to you. if you are not quite sure what i mean do a search in this site for "anchor text" - loads of great info to be found
good luck
How many links (ball park) would I need to receive a respectable ranking?
SpinnerC
Google's guideline is to have 100 or less links per page. Even so too many links mean that surfers will probably think "eek" at the thought of going through them and just back up if there are too many links. And don't forget about other search engines.
As for how many inbound links you need to rank well? That depends on very many factors. Most important is the competitiveness of the search term. You will learn soon how many is enough as you see your ranking based on the number of inbounds. You can sticky me the search term and I will try to give you an idea.
Kevin
