Link popularity is measured by the number of inbound link to your site onto a specific page and gauging the quality and relevancy of the incoming links. This is including links within the site and ones coming from the outside.

In determining a site’s ranking, link popularity is one of the most important factors in deciding ranking for top search engines.

Ways to increase link popularity

1) Request link exchanges with similar sites by: exchanging small ads, exchanging articles (becoming a more popular way of exchanging links), contact potential website partners and request them of link exchange maybe including why you think the link exchange may be beneficial to both sites.

2) One-way link building are links pointing to your website without you having to link back to them. If managed, it’s a great way to improve link popularity and ranking in search engines but are more difficult to obtain. They’re a great way to secure long-term search engine ranking results.

How to get inbound one-way links?

• Submit your site to major directories. As I’ve talked about before (click to see article), FreeWebSubmission is a great place to start.
• Target a niche or industry and become an authority by displaying your expertise.
• Supplying helpful material such as informative/quality articles, FAQs, definitions, free services, white papers, etc. which will provide more reasons why a webmaster will link back to you.
• Submit article to ezine/newsletter publisher and article directories. One you can try is EzineArticles.
• Participate in forums as an expert who gives advice – make sure to include your signature.
• Frequently update your blog as search engines love the new content.
• Submit your blog to weblogs directories.

These steps should increase link popularity and enhance overall search engine popularity. They are great methods because they are free and most cost-effective!

I’m reading it everywhere. Many people are wondering if they are losing traffic, page rank or search ranking because Google has discovered that they were selling paid links.

How will sites be penalized? The word is that Google could prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing Page Rank and drop or remove a PageRank score from ones that already have it. Some webmasters have reported drops of 1-2 scores. To confirm suspicions, Search Engine Land

confirmed with Google that Page Rank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

I’ve read numerous posts on this and Search Engine Land summed the positions of all arguments perfectly:

• It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
• Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
• Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
• Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.
• I don’t want people who innocently sell links to be harmed.

Ugh…Who knows how far back Google has or will be reviewing their database to apply penalties to websites.

I’ve compiled some great articles/posts on SEO/webmaster experts take on Google’s move. It’s very interesting to read the comments.  Please take time to read some of these articles to decide what you want to do with your website. Right now it’s extremely important to think about your TextLinkAds relationship (if you have one), no follow attributes and protecting yourself by creating a robot file (exclude folders from search engine robots/spiders).

Articles:

• Search Engine Land
• Daily Moolah
• Yaro Starak
• David Airey
• Jennifer Laycock
• Garry Conn
• Not So Boring Life (Instructions refer to creating a robot file to get out of supplemental index, but the same method could be used to hide folders you don’t want Search Engines, like Google to see…)
• Matt Cutts

I don’t know how far Google is going to dig up dirt on selling paid links…it’s going to be interesting and a bit scary.

As with other social community sites, it’s important to be an active user by making friends and contributing new discoveries. Here are a few other tactics that could increase your stumble popularity.

1) Use relevant tags

It’s important to pick the proper tags as it will increase relevant stumbles found either using the search function on their website or toolbar.

2) Choose the right topic

After choosing a site to submit, you are asked to pick a topic to submit it under. Picking the right topic can make or break your Stumble. If you submit the page under a wrong or unrelated topic then people who stumble may be less likely to give it a thumbs up. Opt for general topics versus specific keywords to broaden the search.

3) Receive Help From Your Friends, Family, Network Buddies

StumbleUpon allows you to send your stumbles directly to a friend, whom would be highly likely to enjoy your site and give you a thumbs up – although don’t abuse it!

4) Use Groups and Forums

There are groups covering just about any topic. You are allowed to join up to 63 groups. Some groups allow you the ability to post relevant links to share within the group, depending on the setting created by the moderator.

5) Highlight your blog in StumbleUpon profile

This is very easy.  Enter your blog URL as your website address and it will be displayed above your image on the main page of your profile.  You can write a short blurb about yourself and include your website with a link.

Taking care of the little details like submitting your pages properly, could give you that extra edge and help you gain more traffic with even more links to your site. But of course, the content itself has to be interesting and useful – and sometimes the more entertaining the better!

Who did well? Here were my top 20 traffic sources during the past 30 days:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Direct Traffic
3. Google – Organic
4. MyBlogLog
5. Smashing Magazine
6. Silent Bits
7. Enkay’s Blog
8. Facebook
9. John Chow
10. Marketing Deviant
11. Blue Jar
12. Cash For Comments
13. Shaun Low
14. Design Walker
15. Blogging The Movie
16. Blogosquare
17. zm0ney
18. Blog Rush
19. MySpace
20. Technorati

I also just checked my MyBlogLog account and I was happy to find that I currently have 297 members – not too shabby for a new blog that started in July. Its number is almost reaching one of my other blogs, Got2BeGreen, which has about 365 members.

How to increase your traffic?

It definitely helps to be involved with other blog sites by commenting and networking with fellow bloggers, especially the ones within the same niche.

As far as MyBlogLog, one great way to gain readers by visiting profiles to leave a sort of ‘cookie crumb’ trail. The author will see you stopped by and will usually return the kind visit, resulting in a prospective new contact or member to your site.

You can take further advantage of this opportunity, by focusing on a specific niche and checking out all the members within that similar community.  :)

But there are also a number of additional directories available to further promote RSS feeds to help you increase visitor numbers. I found a list of RSS Directories supplied on DotSauce through a post on Money Making Scoop. The original list is a few months old and include a few urls that no longer work. So I poked around and pulled 36 of the 55 RSS Directories which are functional and easiest to submit, including an addition of my own: Blog Burst.

These RSS directories receive visitors and submissions fairly frequently. I highly recommend checking out #36, Blog Burst. Feeds are manually approved and any blog accepted should receive quality traffic through this service, as some of their clients include Reuters and USA Today.

1. FeedFury
2. FeedBomb
3. Plazoo
4. RSS Micro
5. 2RSS
6. FeedsFarm
7. RSS Feeds
8. Feeds4all
9. Postami
10. Feedest
11. MySpace RSS
    
12. DaytimeNews
13. RSS Feeds Submission
14. MillionRSS
15. Yahoo RSS
16. More News
17. Find RSS
18. Feed Base
19. RSS Motron
20. Octora
21. Blog Digger
22. Feed 24
23. Findory
24. Feed Boy
25. Chordata
26. Golden Feed
27. Read A Blog
28. Newgie
29. Jordo Media RSS
30. RSS Network
31. Ice Rocket
32. Blog Pulse
33. Feeds2Read
34. Feed Shark
35. Feed Plex
36. Blog Burst

There are a few easy options to create a poll, like using BuzzDash.com or a wordpress poll plugin. There is also another highly-customizable service called PollDaddy, which allows you to create free polls to place on your site, blog, Friendster, Myspace and share it in many other places.

PollDaddy stands out from the rest because of its unique options to display a poll using Javascript, a direct link, widget, RSS or Flash. The RSS option is quite unique as it allows you to follow an interesting poll closely by just subscribing to it. BuzzDash has just released a similar option but it only gives you the option to look a random “buzzbites” from iGoogle.

In comparison to other poll services, some of their other features are golden:

• It’s never too late to edit a poll
• Multiple choice answers are available
• The option “Other” allows users to enter their own answer
• Choice to turn or off the poll on PollDaddy’s site

Customizing the look of PollDaddy to match and blend into your site’s design is very nice. If PollDaddy likes the ways your customized poll looks, they may even approve it for public use.They’ve just recently won a top 10 spot in their publishing category with CNET and now serving over 14,000,000 polls per month.

Here’s a short list of some of the top social communities:

1. MySpace – Create a community and share photos and interests. Most importantly connect with their growing network and get involved in ‘groups’.
2. Facebook – Facebook is a very popular social service connecting your to friends, past co-workers or people you attended school with in the past.
3. LinkedIn – LinkedIn is an online network of more than 14 million experienced professionals from around the world.
4. MyBlogLog – Connect with readers and other blog authors.
5. Yahoo Answers – A community to ask and answer questions. In the source section, sometimes conveniently add your url as the ‘source’ (although, don’t overuse to avoid spam issues).
6. Google Groups – Discuss online. It is fairly easy to ‘drop’ references.
7. Twitter – You can add links with your twitter posts, which can result in traffic to the linked site.
8. Zimbio – Share stories and even add links to other users pages.
9. Blog Catalog – Social directory connecting bloggers.
10. Digg- A very popular news community to vote for stories and leave comments.
11. StumbleUpon – A great service that allows you to submit new sites to the community to receive a thumbs up or down rating.
12. Reddit – Bookmarking source for popular news and stories
13. Diigo – A social bookmarking service that allows adding sticky notes, highlights and easy sharing amongst users.
14. Blogowogo – Add news to be rated by other bloggers. All daily posts are automatically posted to the community by using your RSS.
15. Del.icio.us – Another popular bookmarking service that is currently going through a makeover.
16. BlinkList – Save bookmarks and share with the beta community.
17. Simpy – Bookmarking service allowing you save your favorite websites.
18. Clipmarks – Highlight sections of web pages you enjoy and share with the growing clipmark community.
19. Blue Dot – Share web content with friends and family.
20. Truemors – A Guy Kawasaki site based on posting ‘rumors’
21. Dzone – A free link-sharing community amongst developers.
22. Blog Carnivals – Participate and be a part of organized collection of good posts.
23. Bumpzee – Submit blogs and articles
24. Thoof – Submit articles/postings
25. Sphinn – News, Discussion, Forum

In addition to ‘regular’ social networks. There are social communities that allow you to gain a share of the community revenue that can also be used to drive traffic. You can make money not only from visitors to your site but from the activity on your social networking account itself.

26. MyLot – Thrives on an active community to carry discussions.
27. Gather – Share thoughts and ideas. Ad revenue is shared amongst users.
28. Flixya – Share videos and photos but also have a chance to earn.
29. Xomba – Write postings on their site and get paid through Google Adsense
30. Dada – Social community and earn through Google Adsense by revenue sharing.

InvestingAdventures.com!

Congratulations! He has now won the second free 4-Hour Workweek book and gets the chance to sign the records book that will be featured in Blogging The Movie, which is getting plenty of hype….even by John Chow.

Time to pass the “baton”…I hosted the last contest and now I will be passing along the records book to Jorge from InvestingAdventures.com to be signed. If you weren’t able to enter the first time around, there is still plenty of time since there are 8 spots left. InvestingAdventures.com will now be hosting the 3rd round of the contest in which Cash For Comments will be sponsoring.

Thanks to all who jumped on board for a chance to win a free copy of the 4-Hour Workweek book, permanent link on Blogging The Movie dot com and a small feature in the movie. I have some insider information and from what I heard, there are going to be a few heavy-hitters on board for the movie so I would definitely look forward to the end product of Blogging the Movie…

Adwords appear on the right side and top of Google’s natural search results

Yahoo PPC ads appear on the right side and top of natural search results

If you’re not familiar with PPC Advertising….

If you place the highest bid for a specific keyword or phrase, you will rank #1 in paid listings. If someone clicks on your PPC ad/listing, you will be charged the amount you setup. So if you bid $.10 cents per click and you’re the highest bidder, you’ll show up first in line and if 100 people click on your listing, you will be charged $10.00. Competition for keywords can drastically be different depending on the niche market.

As example in Adwords:

As of 9/10/2007:

Blog Help = $.62 – $.87 CPC
Diets = $1.49 – $2.09 CPC
Make Money = $1.94 – $2.68 CPC
Mortgage = $10.95 – $16.33 CPC

PPC can cost a fortune for a new user as bidding wars can erupt quickly over a popular key phrase and can get expensive in a big hurry and sometimes cause your ROI (Return On Investment) to get out of control if visitors leave your site to never return.

PPC Can Be Risk Free

PPC can prove to be beneficial and work to your advancement especially if you find a low bid keyword niche. It can even be a no lose situation to utilize many of the PPC programs out there that are giving out free paid clicks for new account holders, ranging anywhere from $10-$50 in free credit. In this case, PPC can generate traffic to your site at no cost. Just remember to turn off/pause the PPC campaign when the free money runs too low for comfort.

There are a few programs I’ve personally tried and have netted some good results. It didn’t cost me any money, so ROI wasn’t an issue for me or my pocketbook.

Some of those I found giving out free clicks are:

1. Bidvertiser is giving out $20 worth of Free Clicks
2. Yahoo is giving out $25 worth of Free Credit (If you sign-up with Blue Host you can sign-up to Yahoo’s Search Program for $50 worth of Free Credit)
3. Ad Marketplace is giving away $25 in Free Clicks
4. Microsoft Ad’s Center is giving a small amount, but Free $5 to start
5. Search123 gives you $25 in Free Clicks after initial deposit of $50.
6. Miva is giving away $25 in Free Clicks after initial deposit of $50.
   

The overall rule of thumb at succeeding at PPC marketing?

Focus and Research. Pay-per-click advertising should be handled with short term goals in mind to start and should be handled with great care, with quantifiable goals. Using free clicks from services gives some beginners practice in distinguishing the value in conversions vs getting clicks and help you fine tune your campaigns to bring in the traffic you want. It also relieves any curiosity to the world of PPC marketing….

They say that curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back

Heard of DealDotCom? Doors are planned to open tomorrow for this new discounted shopping network on September 18th geared towards Internet Marketers, using a one product a day, concept.

DealDotCom claims to consider everything under the umbrella related to “Internet Marketing” to be featured on the site at a extremely discounted price, such as products related to:

• Building an online business
• Marketing products or services
• Ways to increase traffic and monetize a site
• Web design and SEO Marketing
• Ebay and ecommerce marketing
• Social and web2.0
• ebooks and videos
• Investing and financial information
• Blogging

Although that I feel that most information on e-marketing can be found on the internet for free from blogs, research or networking, I’m curious about this site.  Joining early could promise a good opportunity to spread the word before the greater internet community gets wind of it.

DealDotCom does a smart thing creating an urgency to buy the product by only holding a limited inventory (first come first serve) of products till midnight.

Membership is free and offers a lifetime two-tier commission structure. When someone is referred, there is a 35% commission rate for the 1st tier. 2nd tiers will earn 15% commission.

If the DealDotCom turns out to be successful, signing up affiliate referrals early will be beneficial.  I’ve already signed up for a free account. Hey might as well join early and spread the word, before everyone else jumps on board.