Understanding Link Popularity

Revealing Your Most Critical Promotional Technique

Link Popularity is just like when you were in high school and all that mattered was if you were "in" and "popular". Well now it is your website that needs to be "popular" and with the Search Engines (SEs).

Link Popularity is basically a measure of the number of inbound links to your website. It is becoming more important as more of the SEs are using this assessment tool when determining rank and positioning. The most well-known of the SEs to incorporated link popularity is Google.

Despite the simple definition above, link popularity is a bit more complicated. If you visit any of the forums on this issue, you will see a lot of different ideas and opinions. The reason is that it is the SEs that care about link popularity and are the ones that determine its importance.

Unfortunately understanding the SEs is not that easy, since they are not always forthcoming with how they do things. Two great ebooks on the search engines are

• Search Engine Fast Start, written by Dan Thies. It is a through step-by-step guide to search engine positioning for the beginner to intermediate level webmasters
• SEOBook, Aaron Wall has put together a great website, blog, and ebook all related to search engine optimization. All are extremely well written and contain a wealth of information.

SearchEngines.com has put together some nice, easy to digest summary tables on the SEs, check them out at How do I improve my Search Ranking.

Putting Link Popularity Into Perspective

Link popularity is important for your website, but also as important is to have a "search engine friendly" website design.

For more information on this, see our General Link Building Section

Also, when promoting your website, don't worry about you link popularity....your first concern should be link building.

Now we are not saying to not worry about link popularity, what we are saying is that if you do your link building correctly your link popularity should follow suit. For more information, see numerous articles on the subject.

Building links is a major task. You need to evaluate every step and remain focused. Getting inbound links to your website is just good business sense.

So what do you need to evaluate when building links? For sites you are linking with:

• What are their keywords, theme, topic?
• Will their visitors be interested in your subject matter?
• Who is linked to them?

Once the links are up and running:

• How much traffic am I getting from the links?
• How is my search engine ranking improving?

  Remember: “Quality Is Just As Important As Quantity”

Need more information?

The well respected Internet Marketer, Sumantra Roy has put together a free online course called Link Popularity Masters Course. Check out it out today.

Link Building 101 is a great post at the SEW Forum and covers a lot of this material and provides numerous links to sites and articles to provide more information for you.

• Link popularity provides one of the strongest methods available for delivering highly relevant search results
• Link popularity becomes a strategy or tactic that can be used to boost site referrals and develop new online relationships
• Link popularity provides a real-time marketing performance metric that is based on an index of independent and publicly available data sources

We definitely agree with MarketLeap's comment and encourage you to work hard on your own link popularity. The time and resources it costs will definitely pay out in the end.

Problems With Link Popularity?

Eric Ward, of Netpost.com, and the man who started the concept of link building, has written The Five Major Flaws of Link Popularity. In this article, he indicates that link popularity does not always help a website. Some of the comments he makes are:

• How does link popularity effect new websites? A new website might be the best ever but will have no inbound links (initially) so this is prejudiced against new sites and calls into question its ability to be an indicator of quality website.
• There are many "link programs" out there that really do nothing but take up web space and do more bad than good.
• Search engines can only index the top two levels of a website so if your links are beyond this secondary directory level, they do not exist in the search engine's eyes.

Another issue webmasters need to understand is that your link popularity will fluctuate some. Link popularity is based on links that the search engines have indexed. The search engines are constantly reindexing and reorganizing its database, so which and how many links a search engine sees pointing to you can vary from month to month.

Link Popularity should be viewed as a gauge of how well your link building is going and not an absolute number.

Finally, the Google PageRank and Link Popularity. PageRank is a number from 0 to 10 assigned to a website, basically related to the web site's popularity, which they use to help determine rankings. A high Google Page Rank will not guarantee you top placement, but a low Google Page Rank can hurt your potential.

Link popularity will not solve all of your traffic issues. As stated above, work on getting quality inbound links and the rest will take care of itself.

Essential Link Popularity Tools

1. Link Popularity Checker:

Curious where your website stands when it comes to Link Popularity? We are proud to offer you this link popularity checker by MarketLeap.com. It is one of the best with easy to understand results. TRY IT!

LINK SURVEY-This link popularity checker can check multiple websites in ten search engines, simultaneously, allow you do download the info in various formats, plus get free live updates. You can download a free copy here or see the details of Link Survey here.

Optilink can easily analyze your links and those of your competition to boost your search engine rankings. For more details on this great Link Reputation Analyzer, click here.

2. Link Monitoring Services:

Once you get the links and have them organized within your website, you need to make sure they are pointing somewhere.

Many websites simply disappear without letting their link partners know. Therefore it is imperative to check your links regularly to make sure they still exist.

We use and endorse LinkAlarm. For more details, see our Review of their services.

3. Our Link Management Script:

Managing your links is just as critical as getting them. Thus we have created a powerful and easy to use Link Management Script for you to automate your link building.

Websites that make it clear and easy that they do link exchanges will be more successful. Visitors will be able to add their link immediately and then notify you of the new addition.

You will have full control over the final decision of whose links will be added. No prior programming knowledge of ASP, Perl or HTML is needed. We can help customize the linkspage to fit seemlessly into your website!

Decide For Yourself and Order Today. With our 90 day guarantee, and great customer support, it couldn't be simpler.

4. Professional Link Building:

If after reading all of this, you realize you are in over your head, let a professional do the job for you. They are tons of SEO, search engine optimization companies that provide this link building. Contact Linking101 for our recommendations.

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