What is Link Popularity?

Link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to and from related sites and is an extremely important method of improving your site's relevancy in search engines.

There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your site:

  1. Internal links;
  2. Inbound/incoming links; and
  3. Outbound/outgoing links.

Let's take a look at each one in more detail.

Internal Links

Internal link popularity refers to the number of links to and from pages within a site. I recommend cross linking your important related pages. This helps search engine spiders find and index your most important pages quicker, especially if some pages are buried deep within your site.

Site Maps

Site maps are visual models of a site's content that allows users to find specific content or page. Site maps are like interactive table of contents, with links leading to most, if not all, pages of a web site. Site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the site's information into increasingly specific subject areas. If you have more than a dozen pages, I recommend you include a site map in your site. The add a link to the site map page from the home page, and on other pages. This way search engine spiders will find the site map, crawl the links and index your entire web site.

Inbound/Incoming Links

Inbound/incoming link popularity refers to links pointing to a site from other related sites. In addition, there are two types of inbound links:

  1. Links from sites you control: SEO experts do recommend linking between sites with targeted keywords. The reason for doing this is because some of the major search engines, such as Google, place a great importance on the text used within, and close to, links. But do not cross-link every page in one website with every page in another; and
  2. Links from sites you don't control: There are two ways of finding sites to link to yours. The best way to get other sites to link to yours is to ask them politely. And the best way to find likely candidates is to ask web sites that link to your competition. To find out which sites are linking to your a particular competitor, visit a search engine such as Yahoo! and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors domain name (with and without "www"). Yahoo! offers far more results than Google, so Yahoo! is the preferred choice.

    For example:

    link:www.competitor.com

    To check the link popularity of your own sites, simply use your own domain name. Do not forget that all the sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as the Yahoo! Directory and Open Directory Project, are ideal link candidates too.

    Once you have compiled a list of related sites, add a link to them in your site. Then send an email to each web site owner informing them that you have linked to their site and politely ask them for a link back to your site. Another way of finding sites to link to yours is to find sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for:

    "add url" "your keywords"

    Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, 'add url' with one of the following sets of search phrases:

    add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link

    In addition, you can also find site submission pages by searching for the actual page. So, try replacing the 'add url' search phrase with one of the following page names:

    addurl.html, addsite.html, addlink.html, submiturl.html, submitsite.html, submitlink.html, add-url.html, add-site.html, add-link.html, submit-url.html, submit-site.html, submit-link.html, add_url.html, add_site.html, add_link.html, submit_url.html, submit_site.html, submit_link.html

Outbound/Outgoing Links

Outbound/Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outbound links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site. How much importance outgoing links add to a site's link popularity rating is still being debated by search engine optimization specialists.

Link Keywords

It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords play a major part in determining the relevancy of a Web page, it is essential that they are also included in link text.

Link Quality

The quality of the links is just as important, if not more, than the number of links to your site. The types of sites you should concentrate on getting links from include major search engines (Google, etc.), popular search portals (MSN, etc.), web directories (Yahoo! Directory, Open Directory Project, etc.), high trafficked sites (eBay, Amazon, etc.), news sites (CNN, etc.), and sites related to your site's theme.

Link Exchanges & Link Farms

Do not get links from link exchange sites and link farms. Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. All of the major search engines consider such links as spam, so stay clear of these types of links.

Link Popularity Software

Link popularity software can help you find suitable link exchange partners, by searching the Internet looking for suitable reciprocal link exchange sites, based on the keywords you give. It then evaluates each site, sets up a links directory and uploads it to your server. It even helps you email potential link partners by sending personalized reciprocal link email requests, after you visit and approve those sites you wish to include into your links directory.

Arguably the best link popularity software on the market is the 'Internet Business Promoter' SEO software program. It is definitely up there amongst the best, if not the best.