SEO For Dummies

Chapter 16

Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position

In This Chapter

Understanding how search engines calculate value

Building Web site hubs

Weighing pages with PageRank and TrustRank

Using keywords in links

Identifying links that aren’t links

Thousands of site owners have experienced the frustration of being unable to get search engines to index their sites. You build a Web site, you do your best to optimize it for search engines, you “register” with the search engines, and then nothing much happens. Little or no traffic turns up at your site, your pages don’t rank well in the search engines, and in some cases you can’t even find your pages in the search engines. What’s going on?

Here’s the opposite scenario: You have an existing site, one that’s been around for a while but with few links pointing to it, and finally find a few other sites to link to it. You make no changes to the pages themselves, yet all of a sudden, you notice your pages jump up in the search engines.

There’s ...