Importance and Benefits of Link Popularity

Everyone likes to be popular. In a way, the web is just like one big popularity contest. It wasn't fair in high school, and it might not seem so fair now. You can have the best-designed, most informative site online, but if no one links to you, you're goin' to have a harder time gettin' a high search engine rankin'. Rankin' high with search engines relies on two things: content and link popularity.

Of course, if you have the most informative site online, your job is half done. One of the keys to bringin' in new links is havin' a well-designed site. If you go after link exchanges & your site looks like it belongs in the last decade, you're goin' to be hard-pressed to find any takers. People don't have all the room in the world to add links on their site. You need to provide a site that is worth linkin' to. On the flipside, you should find link partners with quality sites of their own.

Link popularity is not just about quantity, but quality. Certainly, it is a good idea to have a great number of links comin' in, but search engine spiders also take into account the quality of those links: i.e. how many sites link to the site that links to you. Spiders hold a premium on sites that link to you without a correspondin' reciprocal link. When search engine spiders surf your site, they're lookin' for the type of content that you have on your site & the number of links goin' both in and out.

An easy way to start buildin' link popularity is to add your site to a number of directories. These directories may or may not require a reciprocal link. The higher the quality of the directory, the more the directory listin' will be worth. Really, you should spend a good amount of time addin' your site to as many directories as possible. Look for other immediate avenues for link buildin' as well—post in forums, on blogs, or create a blog of your own. All of these will be indexed by search engines, which will help increase your rankin'.

One of the major advantages of havin' a blog is you have one more place to add a link to your site. In addition, you have one more place where you can trade links—contact other bloggers in a similar field & trade links. You should not only be lookin' to increase link popularity for the host site, but for blogs & other sub-sites as well.

It is absolutely imperative that your site is useful. The more content you provide, the more you can get a foothold in your industry. When you write new content, promote it: Digg.com the article & add the article to directories & other sources. Websites can then potentially place the article on their sites, linkin' to the site where the article originated. A link doesn't necessarily have to be permanent—a temporary link to an article can help search engine rankin' as well.

What this all means is that link popularity is an evolvin' process. You should always be correspondin' with site owners lookin' for a link trade. And you should be frequently providin' new content to ensure that your site is worth the link.

Link-Popularity.com: See who links to your web site. This service provides an easy one-click method of checkin' link popularity on three of the major search engines. They also provide a free monthly customized Link Popularity Report via e-mail.

Who links to my blog?