Increasing Hits by Improving the Link Popularity of Your Site

10) Starting your own affiliate program

This is another excellent way by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. When you have your own affiliate program, you give other webmasters the incentive to link to you. In this case too, since most of these web sites will be related to the industry in which you are operating, these links will be more valuable than links from unrelated sites.

Now, when you start your affiliate program, you need to decide whether you want to run the program yourself, or whether you want to outsource it from a third party. While outsourcing your affiliate program has a number of benefits, doing so will not help you improve the link popularity of your site, because affiliates are going to link to the third party's site.

Hence, if one of the objectives of starting an affiliate program is to improve the link popularity of your site, you need to run the affiliate program yourself by purchasing some affiliate program scripts.

However, with some affiliate program scripts, the affiliate links contain a "?". Since many search engines will ignore URLs that contain a "?" (because they consider these to be dynamic pages), you need to ensure that the affiliate script that you purchase generates static HTML pages for your affiliates to link to.

You can get some affiliate program scripts at www.perlarchive.com

11) Submitting to the directories

This is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory, LookSmart, Snap and Go. Hence, it is vitally important that you get your site registered by these directories.

Also, you should submit your site to as many of the smaller directories as possible. You can get a list of such directories at Yahoo

(If the above URL wraps, copy and paste the first line in your browser's address box, then copy and paste the second line, and then press Enter.)

Wrapping things up:

Every week or so, make a list of the new sites which you know have linked to you over the past week. Also, have a look at your server logs and find out the new sites from which you have received traffic. Submit each of these pages to the search engines. This ensures that the search engines are able to spider the pages which are linked to you.