What is Link Popularity?

Link Popularity is the number of hyperlinks pointed to your website. It's also many times used as term for Google's PageRank, Google's own method of search engine link popularity. The search engines have decided that if many sites are linking to your site, that site must be a better than the others and deserves a boost in their rankings. If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People are linking to good websites, not to bad ones.

Why is Link Popularity So Important?

Now these days, inbounds links are the one of most important factor for getting a high keyword ranking, the most search engines are ranking their search result on the link popularity from your site. Not the quantity from the links, but the quality of those links is important. It's also important that the inbound links are in the same topic. Remember one good link can be more important than hundred bad links. Not only the search engines page ranking is important, good links creates also extra traffic to your website.

How Do I Improve My Link Popularity?

First of all stay away from link farms, free for all links and similar schemes. They don't help you with your PageRank. You have a bigger change that your site get banned from the search engines than that you receive a PageRank boost.

1. Get listed in the internet directories (Yahoo, DMoz). One of the most important things is that you are listed in Open Directory Projects. There are many directories on the internet try to add your link in so many directories if you can, they are great recourses for incoming visitors.

2. Ask other website owners to link to you. A great way to find other website owners who are maybe willing to link to you is to do a link popularity check on one of your competitors. These sites are most of the time in the same topic as you.

3. Swap links with other website owners. Swapping links with other website owners is also useful for to boost your link popularity. The theory goes that you add a link to a website and they are adding a link to your site. One important thing is that a link ranks higher if the sites are in the same topic.



(information courtesy of widexl)