Link popularity is the total number of qualified web sites linking to your web site. In other words Link popularity is the number of links that point to a webpage and is a crucial factor used by almost all of the search engines to rank websites. This article will show you the importance of link popularity and how to improve your webpage’s link popularity utilizing a few different techniques.
Link Popularity Importance
Link popularity and link quality are very important because every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms. If you don’t have links, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords. With the every increasingly popularity of Google, web site owners marketing efforts have had to change to accommodate what Google is looking for in a quality site. One way to prove that you have a quality site has been with link popularity. Good quality incoming links coupled with good quality page content will bring highly targeted traffic, and a lot of it. Just keep in mind that quality is key. The saying less is more really applies here. Just because your website has five hundred incoming links doesn’t mean that they are all relevant. Ensure that the links you are getting are relevant to the content that your page is offering. This is extremely important.
Tips to Improving link Popularity
1. Prepare your site first: Before you start your link building campaign, take time to get your site in shape. Make sure your site looks professional, has good content and is easy to navigate. Validate your HTML code and check your links with a tool like HTML Toolbox. If a potential linker goes to your site and finds broken pages, they are not going to want to link to you.
2. Directory Listings: Ensure your site is listed in the Open Directory Project (ODP) and also in Yahoo’s Business Express ($299 yearly) and LookSmart Express Submit or Basic Submit. Directory listings boost popularity because they rely on human editors, known to only select relevant websites. You may also try searching for other directories to submit to. Do a search for “list of directories”.
3. Cross Linking: Or you may hear it referred to as internal linking. Make sure you cross link your important related pages. This technique tells the search engines that these are the more important pages within your website therefore they will increase in ranking. Cross linking your pages also helps the search engines find and index your most important pages quicker, especially if you have hundreds of pages and some of them are four and five levels deep. Internal linking is a great way to increase the amount of keywords in your visual text links. You will notice that we have linked to our list of directories and search engines. This is an example of internal linking. We’ve essentially told the search engines that these are pretty important pages of this site.
4. Publish articles: Write up some informative articles your audience is interested in, then submit these articles to online publications in your industry. Provide a brief bio which includes your web sites URL and make a condition that the article must be published intact with your bio. Over a short period of time you should gather some quality links.
5. Request Links: Open up an Excel spreadsheet and list all of the possible linking partners that you have gathered. Now that you have a list of possible link partners put a link on your site to their site and then email each site owner telling them that you’ve linked to them and respectfully ask them to link back to you in return. You would be surprised by the amount of response you get. Make it as easy as possible for the other site to link to you. I’ve found a that actually providing a form so the site owner can just copy and paste your link code into their site makes linking to you extremely easy. This can save a lot email-tag for the both of you.
Note: Impersonal broadcast emails asking for links are spam. Sure, it’s easier, but it will only result in making another company mad at you. Spam link requests do not work and waste everyone’s time. Don’t do it!
