Link Popularity

The Single Most Important Factor In Positioning

In recent years, more and more search engines have started to heavily rely on a link popularity measurement in order to determine ranking for your site. This is actually a good way for them to get more accurate ranking, while minimizing the irrelevant pages that are optimized for irrelevant keywords. In other words, it makes your job much harder, because just optimizing your site isn't enough.

In this way they don't just look at the content on each page. Most also analyze link structures and clicks to determine the best results to show in a search.

In a nutshell, link popularity is measured by the number of links between websites. So, if you have many outbound links on your site, and there are many links TO your site, your value increases.

Example:

Site A is linked to by 1,000 other web pages that are indexed in a certain search engine.
Site B is only linked to by 50 other web pages that are index by the same engine.

Site A will likely have a much better link popularity rating, and even if Site B has a better-optimized site, it is likely that Site A will have better ranking.

All Links Were Not Created Equal

There is an added catch to the link popularity issue. Not only are the quantity of links considered, but also the quality of links. If a site that links to you is considered by the engine to be important, it will carry much more weight than some random site. Furthermore, most search engines assign themes to websites they index no, and if you have a higher inbound link count from websites of the same theme, you will be better off than having links from unrelated sites.

For these reasons, you should attempt to trade links with sites that are similar to yours in some way, and really try with very popular sites.

See It For Yourself

Google uses a system called Page Rank, which is actually Link Popularity. If you go to Google and download the Google Toolbar, you will be able to see Google's Page Rank calculation on a scale of one to ten for every page you visit. Do some searches, and you will see that pages with a higher Page Rank tend to get much better positioning than pages with a lower rank. While Google does not tell you exactly how they rank pages, they do admit that it a based heavily on how many sites link to you, and that 'quality' sites linking to you are given more weight in the calculation.

Where To Start

So you have a new website, and don't want to wait years to build link popularity, right? Well, time is certainly the cure, as sites naturally grow more popular over time.

But, to get you a head start, try the following:

Submit To Yahoo and DMOZ

Submit your site to Yahoo and DMOZ as soon as possible. These are popular directories and will help your link popularity. Submit to other directories, of course.

Trade Links With Other Webmasters

Find other people that are willing to exchange links with you. Not only will you benefit in link popularity, but you are more likely to get more traffic from them, as well. If possible, trade with larger companies, and companies in a similar business…. even your competition if you dare. Do searches with keywords that you want to target, as well as similar, complimentary keywords. E-Mail the webmasters of the sites that have high ranking and offer to trade links with them. These sites are more likely to be considered higher quality for your popularity.

Find Trade-Related Websites

Trade with sites that have directories of businesses in your industry, and make sure they add your link.

Encourage Your Customers To Put A Link To You On Their Website

Never underestimate your customers. They are some of the most likely people around to link to you. Ask.

Outbound Links And Internal Links

Add to the link puzzle links you have going beyond your website. This helps. Also consider that the more internal links (between pages on your own site) you have, the easier it will be for a spider to crawl your web.