This week we're telling you why giving an overview of something can increase your link popularity. In the news: A new search engine allows you to find interesting web sites that don't exist anymore.

Table of contents:

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
• Previous articles

We hope that you enjoy this issue and that it helps you to get more out of your web site. Please pass this newsletter on to your friends.

We published the toolbar article because it's a great example of how you can improve the link popularity of your web site: with the help of unique content.

If you don't know yet that improving the link popularity of your web site increases your search engine ranking, you can read an introductory article here.

You can ask other webmasters to link to your site in order to increase the link popularity of your web site. But why should they link to your site? It only makes sense for them to link to your web site if your site is worth linking to. Every outbound link on a web site is a recommendation for the linked site so people like to link to sites that offer great articles or information you can't find elsewhere.

This summer, there were several news stories when a new search engine toolbar had been released. When we wanted to inform us about those toolbars we noticed that there were many web pages describing some of the toolbars but that there was not a single page that compared all toolbars. We immediately recognized a good opportunity to write such an article ourselves.

Now, with this article in our newsletter archive, our web site offers unique content that you can't find elsewhere. We expect other sites to link to our toolbar overview article as time goes on. This will increase the link popularity of our web site which in turn will increase the ranking of our site in the search engines.

Writing articles can improve your link popularity in several ways:

• You can send articles to web sites that publish articles. Just search Google for the key phrase "add article" (including the quotes) and you'll find many sites that accept articles. When your article has been published, they also publish a link to your site thereby improving the link popularity of your web site.
  
  
• Every article is automatically full of keywords that potential visitors search for in the search engines. Even better, every article contains key phrases that you didn't think of before. With every article, chances increase that web surfers will find your site in the search engines.
  
  
• When you publish many articles about the topic of your business, your visitors will see you as an expert in your business area. They're more likely to buy from you and they're more likely to link to your site.
  
  
• If you publish many articles on your web site, people will notice it and they will voluntaritly link to your web site because of the great content.
  
  
• You can also allow your articles to be re-published as long as credit is given to you and your site. This can be an excellent viral marketing tool. As some sites publish your article, others will read your article and decide to re-publish it, too.

Writing articles is an excellent way to improve your link popularity--but what if you can't write because of lacking writing skills or time constraints?

You can use pre-written articles from web sites that offer free articles for you to re-publish. When you add them to your site, you can still build content and share some of the benefits mentioned above.

Here's a list of some good article directories where you can find articles and where you can submit your articles to:

• http://www.articlecity.com
• http://www.bpubs.com
• http://www.certificate.net/wwio/topics.shtml
• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.goarticles.com

If you want, you can also re-publish our newsletter articles as long as you don't change the contents and provide a link to our web site. Just visit our newsletter archive.

Of course, articles are only one way to improve the link popularity of your web site. The link popularity software program ARELIS helps you to locate and contact potential link partners. It also helps you to create and manage your link pages quickly and easily.

"Overture, which is being acquired by Yahoo, has been testing a new local search product since last week. [...]

The new local search is known among some in the advertising industry as geo-targeting. It's a way for national advertisers to finesse their ads for a particular region, or city, or, at some point, a particular neighborhood, like the Upper East Side in Manhattan or the Marina in San Francisco. [...]

By establishing a local-search service, Yahoo, through Overture, is expanding its ability to service its nationwide advertising clients, like CompUSA."

Overture's local search demonstration page: http://localdemo.overture.com/

Recall, the search time machine

Recall is a new search engine that searches more than 11 billion web pages of the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive has pages dating way back to 1996 through the present day. This search time machine allows you to see what a web site looked like in 1997 and today. It also features automatic categorization of your search term and shows you the popularity of your search term over time. Try the search engine.

FindWhat plans to acquire Miva e-commerce tools

"Search provider FindWhat.com [...] plans to acquire Miva, a provider of online storefronts and other e-commerce functions, in a bid to buff up its offerings for small businesses. [...]

The deal is subject to approval by both companies' boards of directors. Miva would operate as a division of FindWhat [...] The deal is expected to close by the end of the year."

Overture launches in the Netherlands

From an email message that Overture sent to its customers yesterday: "Overture Services [...] officially launches its Amsterdam office in the Netherlands. At launch, the Overture Netherlands search network will include key distribution partners such as MSN, AltaVista, Lycos, Ixquick, 1stekeuze with more partnerships to follow."

Search engine newslets

Google's product search engine Froogle has been updated with a few small new features such as sorting by price.

"Yahoo! [...] announced that it has received anti-trust approval from the U.S. Department of Justice to acquire Overture Services Inc.".

Lycos Europe has revamped the European version of its HotBot search engine. The new version of HotBot is being in launched in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.

South African users of Google can now search Google in Afrikaans, Xhosa and Zulu apart from the original English. A Sotho version will soon be completed.

"The world's most popular site for searching the web, Google, is five years old. [...] Now Google is a noun, adjective and verb."

Fun with the Google calculator

Here are some web logs that try to make fun of Google's newest feature, the calculator:

• http://www.kottke.org/03/08/030814fun_with_the.html
• http://www.waxy.org/archive/2003/08/14/fun_with.shtml
• http://www.donolog.com/archives/000466.html

More and more search engines rank your web pages based on the number of links that point to your web site. Google uses link popularity as the most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas. If you want to have a successful web site, you must have high link popularity.

Here's a free link popularity check software for you. It's a freeware program that checks the link popularity status of your web site on several search engines and compares it to other web sites on the Internet (for example your competitors).

Link Popularity Check is completely safe to install on your system. It will not change the system registry and it will not make any unauthorized connections from your system. The software also includes an un-installer. You can download the freeware application here.

• Complete overview of major search engine toolbars
• How to choose the right keywords for your site
• Nutch - an open source Google rival?
• Does advertising in PPC search engines really work?
• How to overcome spam filters in your linking campaign
• View all past issues...