Link Popularity

Your key to high search engine ranking

It seems like more and more search engines are using link popularity as a part of their ranking process. Google certainly follows this method and uses it as its most important factor for ranking sites. Other big search engines like Altavista, Hotbot, MSN, Lycos, Northern Light, Inktomi, Excite are following by using link popularity as part of their their ranking algorithms.

What is Link Popularity?

Literally speaking, link popularity means the number of sites linking to your site. However, this does not mean that you should aim at getting thousands of sites linking to yours. However, if you are aiming to get a high ranking in the search engines, you need to know that the quality of links is more important that the quantity of links. If your site is linked to many popular sites then you are sure to get a higher ranking than if it is linked to hundreds of unpopular sites. The idea behind link popularity is that other sites will link to you only if you are a quality site offering quality resources. So, if many sites link to you it follows that you are a popular site and therefore deserve a high ranking.

Look at link popularity as a way of getting more traffic to your site. So, by getting other sites linking to you, you are not only ranked higher in the search engines, you also have a large volume of targeted traffic coming to your site.

With the competition increasing daily, getting a good ranking in the search engines is of utmost importance. If you really want a high ranking with the search engines, you need to follow a focussed linking strategy.

Let's look at some of the linking strategies you can adopt:

1. Writing articles on your area of expertise
   Writing quality articles is a sure way of attracting visitors to your site. What could be easier than writing what you know about? So write a great article, find sites that are related to your area of service and submit your article to all those sites. If it's a quality article it's a sure bet. For e.g. we offer free website design and promotion tutorials on our site.
   
   
2. Reciprocal Links
   Asking webmasters of other sites to link to you is a good way of getting links to your site. Politely ask the webmaster (preferably using their name) to add your link to their site. You could tell them that you have added their link to your site, give them a brief description of what your site is about and how it will fit into their site. If you have a good site most probably other sites will want to link to you.
   Tip: A great way to find people who may be willing to link to you is to check your competition's link popularity through a search engine. You can do this by typing: link:/www.yoursite.com or through an online tool such as linkpopularity.com.
   

Other link popularity strategies involve submitting to FFA'a or Free For All page and submitting to all the major and minor directories.

Finally, every week or so, make a list of the new sites which you know have linked to you over the past week. Also, have a look at your site statistics and find out the new sites from which you have received traffic. Submit each of these pages to the search engines. This ensures that the search engines have spidered the pages which are linked to you.