Submitting to Directories: A Comprehensive Guide - Directories as Link Partners
(Page 7 of 10 )
The magic of Link Popularity
While traditional Directories are edited by humans, Search Engines are pure computational sites. The billions of pages now held in the Search Engines database render human intervention impractical. From the gathering of web pages using 'robots' or 'crawlers', through their indexing of that information and finally the ranking of those pages in the search results -- is all done by software and computation.
The first two stages (assembling and indexing) are relatively simple, but the third (ranking) presents a much higher challenge. How would the Search Engine determine which one of the many million pages that contain a particular word or phrase should be shown first? Get it right - and people will be using it time and again. Get it wrong - you will be dropped like a hot potato.
The one engine that seemed to consistently 'get it right' was Google. Its secret was the addition of one ingredient that was not used by any other Search Engine before -- links. According to Google, a link is considered a 'vote of confidence' from one page to another. The more links - the more votes. Moreover, links from 'important' pages are valued higher than votes from 'non important' pages. What's an 'important' page? Well, a page that has a lot of other pages voting for it, in other words -- is heavily linked to. Google's founders coined the term PageRank to describe the numerical value of the page's Link Popularity. As soon as Google introduced Link Popularity in its ranking algorithm, users found the results to be amazingly accurate. Other Search Engines were quick to follow suit. It would be safe to assume that Link Popularity now plays a significant role in the ranking algorithm of all the major Search Engines.
The challenge for site owners and web masters is to increase Link Popularity, which in turn increases the likelihood of pages from their sites appearing high in the search results. One of the best ways to start a link campaign is to get links from Directories. If you put the right amount of effort (and money) into it, you can see your Link Popularity increase significantly in a short space of time. The question is: How to judge the relative merits of Directories? Which ones are worth paying for? What elements do you need to look for to help you make an educated decision?
Next: Link types and Page Visibility >>
More Website Submission Articles
More By MC
/ 25 
