In Search of Optimization

In the beginning, search engines were dumb directories that simply listed websites that were submitted to them. However, search engines became smarter and started creating spiders that crawl the world wide web looking for websites to include in their database. Eventually, these search engines realized that some websites have more inbound links compared to other websites. The ‘gods’ running the search engines thought, if more websites link to website “A” than website “B”, then website “A” has to be more popular than website “B” - thus began the idea of link popularity.

On the other hand, the lowly humans of the WWW quickly came up with link farms in an attempt to make the search engine gods think that their websites are more popular than others. It worked at first but the gods were smarter and devised algorithms to defeat the cheaters. The search engines started to check the context and the relevance of the interlinking websites…

The battle went on and is still ongoing at the time of this writing. But how do you gain popularity? A better question would be, what’s the right way to gain popularity?

The answer goes back to the basics of popularity itself. A person who does better on a particular thing is more likely to be more popular than his competitors. The more popular a person is, the more referrals he gets. The same goes for websites. The best way to gain popularity in the vast world of the web is to do well in your field of expertise and to start to make yourself an expert in your field. The more people perceive you as an expert, the more referrals you get and in the internet, referrals are most often made through links.

But how can I be an expert in my field?

If you have a website about Liposuction, then you want to write ORIGINAL articles about liposuction. I give stress to the word ORIGINAL because you will never be an expert if you just copy other people’s work. At first, you might just get a few visitors - perhaps friends and family, but as you continue to hone your skills and appear more like an expert to your readers, you will start seeing other websites linking to you. Sooner or later, you will see more websites linking to you simply because you’re a source of good information. The more websites linking to you, the more the search engines will see you as popular. The more popular you appear to the search engines, the higher your rank becomes.
Note that we’re only scratching the surface of this topic. There are plenty of ways to gain popularity on the web and we will be dedicating the rest of this series on how to gain link popularity on the web.

Next in Line, Step 6 - Self Promotion.

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