Long Island Browser Premier Internet Directory of Long Island New York your complete Nassau Suffolk Hamptons Long Island New York source covering Nassau County Suffolk County North Shore South Shore Hamptons North Fork South Fork Long Island New York.

Why Be Listed In The Long Island Browser?

       Over the last month some major changes have been taking place in regard to how a web site is ranked in the Search Engines. There is a new ranking system that is now being used by Alta Vista, Excite, Google, Lycos and the search portion of Yahoo. This new system will track and rank sites according to the number of links pointing to a particular web site. Not only is the number of links considered, but the quality of links is considered as well.

       With these new changes now in effect, not only are web sites ranked by keyword relevancy, meta tags, title and text, but the overall popularity of the web site as well. These new changes may have a great impact on the effectiveness of some of the current techniques used to achieve high rankings.

       Establishing quality links to a web site has always been an effective way to build traffic, but now has become a necessity. By obtaining just a few links from high-traffic web sites your traffic will increase considerably. The more high-traffic links you receive, the more traffic you will receive and the higher your web site will be ranked in the Search Engines.

       If you have a quality web site, chances are you're already being linked to and don't even realize it. That's a great starting point however, you must build on that by finding targeted web sites that may be interested in exchanging links with you. A targeted web site will have similar content to yours, but will not be in competition.

       Make linking to you as easy as possible. Create a page on your web site that includes your banners and text link descriptions. Put a link to this page on your main page that says "Link to Us."

       Give your visitors a reason to link to your web site. If you provide a valuable service, you can be sure your visitors will tell their visitors, their visitors will tell their visitors and so on. Word of mouth is one of the best forms of free advertising.

       Write an article and allow it to be freely published. With each article you write you are entitled to include your author bylines. These bylines are nothing more than an advertisement for you, your products or services and your web site. Many web site owners will publish articles on their web site and include live links to the author's web site.

       About 80% of all web site traffic originates from the Search Engines. It is well worth your time and effort to spend some time developing as many links to your web site as possible. Not only will these links bring you additional traffic, but you'll increase your ranking at the Search Engines as well.

       Web sites come and go each day on the Internet. If you visit a web site and find it to be a great resource, show your support for that web site by giving them a link. In addition, tell your ezine subscribers about them. By supporting your favorite web sites, you can show your appreciation for all of the hours and hours of hard work that goes into developing the web site and help ensure it will be there the next time you visit. Without your support, many of your favorite web sites may not be there in the future.

       Shelley Lowery is the Webmistress of Web-Source.net. Your Guide to Professional Web Site Design & Development. Display complete, professionally written articles & photographs on your website that automatically update each week, free. Join The Syndicator. http//www.web-source.net

       In the past year or so, we've seen a new trend when it comes to search engines. Many of the older engines have decreased in popularity and traffic, while newcomers such as Google, Direct Hit, Ask Jeeves and Fast Search have skyrocketed near the top.

       These newer engines bring newer technologies, better ways of indexing pages, more relevant results, faster searches, and let's face it, a 'cooler' look and feel. A few years ago a common search on a popular engine would almost always return a few irrelevant links, and more often than not a few dead links as well.

       Google is definitely the champion of these newcomers and, in my opinion, the best. People go to Google to find good, relevant content, and more often than not the first listing for the search query is exactly what the seeker was looking for. This, along with some deals with other, larger, search engines, has placed Google at the very top, and has made promotion a much easier task for webmasters.

       In addition to being the most popular engine among Web searchers, Google also boasts the largest index on the Web. The Google index comprises more than 1 billion URLs and that number appears to be climbing fast. How does Google do it?

       1. Google has one of the greatest algorithms out there. They are superior to all engines when it comes to determining the topic of a page, and by indexing all the words. This is why Google returns great results for obscure searches. Try searching for your name or that of someone you know as an example.

       2. Google ranks based on link popularity. Their logic is, if a lot of people link to a site, it's probably good. That makes perfectly good sense, and it seems to reflect in their rankings. For example, when a search is performed for the string 'Atlanta Braves', the first result is www.atlantabraves.com, the remaining listings come from Excite, Yahoo, Fastball and more. These are all great results. Now if a search query is 'Atlanta Braves World Series Champions', the first result is also www.atlantabraves.com, with the other results being about the 1995 World Series. Obviously a lot of sites link to the Official Braves site, which is why it shows up so often.

       To get a good listing in Google, you need to first focus on the content of your site. Make sure the content is of high quality and useful to your visitors. Not only will this help getting a good ranking, but with good content it is likely that you will get a lot of links to your site.

       Google ranks not only by the number of incoming links to your site, but also by the quality of those links. For example, if a site is linking to you that has 1,000 links to it, your link popularity ranking will be higher than if the site had no links to it. For this reason, it's a good idea to try to find high traffic sites to link to yours. You might find some of our articles in our Reciprocal Links section useful.

       Getting listed in Directories such as Long Island Browser, Yahoo, the Open Directory Project and Looksmart is also recommended. These directory listings are all incoming links from sites with high traffic, and will improve your link popularity ranking considerably.

       Of course, you'll want Google to know which sites are linking to yours. A good way to do this is to go through your Referral logs and compile a list of URLs, from the most referrals on down, and submit those pages to Google. You can do this manually, but I recommend using a tool such as Dumptruck to do the work for you. Google will crawl these pages, find the links to your site, and increase your link popularity ranking.

       This is the easy part. Simply go to the Submit page (click here) and enter the full URL to the page you wish to submit. It is definitely a good idea to submit your home (index) page, but you might want to also submit your site map page, or perhaps compile a list of links to pages within your site. When Google receives this, they will 'deep crawl' your site, and there is a good chance that most, if not all, of your pages will be indexed in the engine.

       After you submit, check your referral logs for Googlebot, and the amount of requests. If this number is high, Google is doing a deep crawl of your site and you probably shouldn't submit any pages unless they are new.

       You can also be listed in Google by getting a listing in the Open Directory Project. This data is used to populate the Google Directory. Don't expect a tremendous amount of traffic from the Google Directory, but it will help increase your Popularity ranking from Google, as well as give you traffic from many other engines (Lycos, AltaVista, Netscape, AOL, etc.).

       When you get into Google, you will also get into other popular sites that use Google data. The most notable of these is Yahoo, which just recently abandoned Inktomi and began using Google for results not found in the Yahoo Directory. Since Yahoo is the highest traffic site on the Web, there is a good chance of you getting a significant amount of traffic through Google results. It is recommended that you still try to get listed in the Yahoo Directory, but Google can bring plenty of supplemental traffic if not more traffic than Yahoo.

       Google data is also used by other popular destinations such as Netscape Search, Nextel Online, Business.com, Hotrate, Planetclick and plenty more. Getting listed in Google could also bring a steady flow of traffic from these sites.

       Google gives webmasters exactly what they have been looking for, a search engine to generate targeted traffic with little effort, other than keeping the quality of the content in tiptop shape. With Google's nearly exponential increase in popularity, their ever expanding partner list, and their award-winning search algorithm, it is a must to get in. In my opinion, getting into Google should be the primary focus when it comes to promoting one's site on search engines. Google has been on the top of the referral list for every site I've worked on for many months. As they have gained in popularity and more people have started linking to me, those referrals have increased steadily.

       This article was written by Aaron West, and was originally published on iBoost.com

Click here to add your URL to the Long Island Browser!