What Exactly is Link Popularity and Why is it so Important?
Link popularity is where other sites have links to your site. It is essential to driving traffic to your site. Link popularity works on the assumption that if other sites have links to your pages, then it must be that they consider your site to be important and that you provide information that people want to read. A search engine will give your site a high ranking if it thinks that its users will want to read the content on your site.
The more popular the site that links to you, the higher the ranking you achieve with the search engines. If a site has a lot of traffic and links to you, this would be considered to be a quality site. The search engines perceive that both their site and your site must be popular. This is better than having a high number of low-traffic sites with links to your site. Thus, the quality of the links is more important than the quantity of links to your site. The ideal scene is to have a high quantity of quality sites linking to your site.
Everything You should Know About Link Popularity
The number of websites that link to your website is one of the factors that help search engines determine your relevancy for a search term. Link popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your website have proven to be a popular concept for people seeking to improve their search engine rankings.
What is link popularity and how exactly does it work? Search engines don't just look at the content of your website to determine if you are a match for a search. They also look at the number of outside websites that can validate, by linking, that you are a good match. Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that link to you. Search engines also consider the text contained in the link that is pointing to your website. If the text in the links contains keywords you are trying to compete for, the search engines consider your site to have even greater credibility.
Since link popularity has become a factor that people feel like they have some influence over in determining their search engine positioning, many solutions have been proposed for growing your online link popularity. One of the more popular ways is also one of the least effective. Several software programs have been written that help you create lists of websites in your space that might be willing to link to you. These programs also help you gather the email addresses for these sites and even help you craft an email requesting that the site add a link to yours. The concept sounds good but the results are often mixed. If you use one of these tools and simply follow the templates they give you, your email will read like a spam message that won't be taken seriously.
The best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good content and features that provide real value to your audience. As people discover your website and realize its benefits, the likelihood of them linking to your website naturally increases. There are several critical targets if you want to build up your link popularity without appearing to be a spammer. The first is good links from Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. Both of these sites are human based directories that have a lot of influence over search results. If your site is listed in the correct category and has a good description, links from these two websites are seen as validating you are the real thing. The second place it's important to have a link from is topic specific or niche directories. These are websites that are dedicated to news and information that is an exact match for what you provide online. If you have a website that deals with tractor parts, being listed on sites that focus on tractors is very important. In the case where a niche website doesn't know about your website, it's okay to ask them to link to your website. But your message should be personalized to them and also tell them the benefit or feature their users will get from linking to you.
