From Obscurity to Clarity: Getting Famous Online

Lets say you have an amazing webpage, and you’ve gotten smart and created a good relationship with an ad network. If you want to get rich and famous online, you need visitors. Visitors are the only difference between earning $0.25 a month and $25,000 a month in ad revenue.

How do you get visitors? Well, if you’ve got good content, you need to let people know about it. The best and almost only way to actually do this on the Internet right now is through Google. Theoretically, if you just let your website sit around long enough, a Google spider bot will eventually find it and start crawling around indexing things. If you would like to speed up the process, you can create an account with Google Webmaster Tools. You can register your site with Google and submit a site map to let the nice friendly Google spiders know exactly where all the content is located. You can even get feedback reports telling you when and how often the Google bots have searched and indexed your site.

If you’re still too impatient to wait for your indexed webpage to gain reputation over the years as a solid source of information on whatever your subject matter is, you can once again speed up the process by getting other websites to link to yours on a particular topic. Internet search sites like Google place great stock in what other websites think of yours. This means that a link saying “great info on car parts” that points back to your site goes a long way to establishing your website as a good resource for car parts in the eyes of Google. Call up or email your online friends and see if they can help you out with a link and a name-drop. You will be in their debt forever. Also, you can start to pester other popular news sites or blogs with emails asking them to give your content some consideration or linkage. They might actually do it.

An extreme version of this idea is to make a formal agreement with a website that is already popular to share content and drive traffic to each other’s sites. An agreement like this can be a godsend to a website that is just starting out, and by helping your website gain a reputation, the more popular website is creating a valuable ally that can in turn help them gain even more popularity.

Also, a little online advertising of your own can really help your new site get traffic. You can join those ranks of intrepid Google AdWords advertisers who already pepper your own site with ads by signing up for a new account and going through the process of building a few ad blocks, selecting keywords, and setting the whole contraption loose on an unsuspecting public. However, since Google AdWords is such an organic system, it requires constant oversight from you. This is ideally two or three hours a day maintenance, changing ineffective keywords for effective ones and tweaking the bids of your effective keywords. Make sure that’s something you want to do.

So you can’t make millions of dollars just by having a website, you still have to spend 8 to 10 hours a day advertising it. There’s still no such thing as a free lunch, but the effect of even a little work on the Internet can have great returns.

The Next Level

When you reach a certain threshold, you earn the attention of not only legitimate users, but other website operators who want to work together with you to help you both gain more visitors. They’ll probably email you out of the blue and ask to start link-sharing agreements. Link-sharing is an important part of a growing website, but not all link-sharing offers are beneficial to you, or even legitimate.

Most link-sharing ideas are trying to game the system that search engines have created to rank websites. Of course, the most popular search engine right now is Google, and its page-ranking algorithm that it uses is strictly a trade secret. It also keeps vigilant watch over its search results, and punishes websites which have used misleading or dishonest means to gain their page rank by relegating them to a secondary index - the Internet search equivalent of Limbo.

Trading Secrets

But before we get into a detailed description of link sharing or other ways to increase traffic, we should first describe the system that link sharing is meant to interact with. Google’s PageRank algorithm is the stuff of legend - it makes or breaks new Internet businesses all the time. Google indexes all sites by keywords, what information they have in text on their site. But Google often gives hundreds of thousands of results. Which results are the most relevant is one of the most important secondary concerns that the Google search engine takes care of, and the real reason for its popularity. You might be looking for the #1 spot for Beatles lyrics on the Internet, but a search for “Beatles lyrics” can turn up hundreds of thousands of websites. How can you make sure that the first few, more relevant, results be about the words to songs that the British band the Beatles wrote, rather than the one page of some guy who named his Volkswagen Beetle “lyrics” and decided to write a page about it? Google solves this problem by using Google PageRank.

With a secret method, Google assigns each webpage in its search index a rank. These ranks are simply from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least relevant and informative page for a certain keyword or search string, and 10 being not only relevant, but extremely popular, helpful, and well-known sites on the Internet. All of the websites on the Internet are arranged on this ranking in a sort of bell curve, with the large majority of sites being around 4 or 5. Popular destinations for specific uses, such as an actual Beatles lyrics site, can get a page rank of 7 or 8. Extremely well-known sites with millions of visitors per day and the highest standards of information on them can get 9. Very few sites, such as usa.gov and cnn.com, can have a PageRank of 10. Google also gives itself, google.com, a PageRank of 10.

Google uses a large mash-up of information to determine a site’s PageRank. One of those pieces of information is the number of links that point to a given site. Also, what kind of text is surrounding this link. If there are many sites which have text talking about a specific subject, like cell phones, and they all point to our website, we would get a higher PageRank when cell phones were searched for on Google. Also, a second but still important aspect of PageRank is the number of links that point from a particular site to another one. If a site has a large number of both incoming and outgoing links, it can be considered a hub of information on one or more topics, which factors into the site’s PageRank. There are a number of other secret factors that are said to go into a PageRank, and Google does not release the information in order to try to avoid people manipulating the system.

Gaming the System

While Google’s purpose is to try to give the most accurate search results possible, website creators vie for a coveted high PageRank for one or more keywords. Because, of course, more popularity in Google means more traffic, and more traffic means more advertising revenue. This may be the first time in history where one company is responsible for the success of so many others. Google holds the fortunes of millions within the palms of its digital hands.

So people try to manipulate the system anyways. Link exchange programs are one of the most popular ways to do this. Web site owners may try to actively drum up more links to their own website in order to increase the popularity on Google. There are several ways to go about this, some of which are worthwhile, and some of which will backfire on you.

The best kind of link exchange happens without active effort on your part. Internet users simply find the content on your website interesting, and link to it. Perhaps they run a blog, or edit a Wikipedia entry, or make a forum post with your link in it. These all help you to gain reputation and popularity with Google, and benefit you.

Another kind of link exchange is done with a lot of work on your part. Instead of just waiting around for people to find and link your content, you can peddle your site around the Internet, going around and posting links back to your own articles on other people’s blog comment sections, forums, or Wikipedia entries. This might be a little annoying to those people who run those sites, but also might help your own website’s reputation to grow faster.

A third kind of link exchange begins to involve other people. You can create agreements with websites that share a similar topic or interest with your own, and agree to give some links to their site in exchange for them giving you links in return. This can also help your online street cred as part of a growing body of work relevant to one or more keywords.

You can also pay Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people to do all of the above. This is where things get risky, because you are artificially trying to inflate your PageRank with cash. You can pay some gentlemen in another country to spread links to your sites all over the Internet, and they will do so. However, it may be possible that it will look too artificial, and then Google with lower your PageRank without telling you. Or, it may relegate your pages to the Limbo of the secondary index, as mentioned before. How artificial and sketchy things look, and whether or not you get caught, depend on the quality of the links you create. If you have ever visited an unregulated or abandoned blog, you might see some of the poorest quality links show up in the comments. They just have a bunch of keywords crammed together into a huge paragraph, and the whole paragraph is linked somewhere. It is debatable whether this kind of brute-force tactic is even effective, and yet it happens with surprising regularity. A more elegant solution is for one website owner to pay a firm to write relevant, content-specific articles which link back to his site. This is almost an undetectable way to increase page popularity, but will undoubtedly cost more money.

Of course, if you are concerned with authenticity or simply have a budget too small to hire anyone, you can always just let your website grow naturally. And, if you have high enough quality content, it will do so without much prodding from yourself. It’s all up to you.