What is Link Popularity?

The term link popularity simply means the amount of webpages that link to yours. The search engines consider pages with many links pointing to them important and web pages with little or no links pointing to them un-important. This makes sense as it takes time to build link popularity and if a site has thousands of links pointing to it, it must be good. Of course there are ways to spam the search engines and generate 1000's of links in a short time, but the odds are you'll eventually be filtered out as spam and possibly banned from the search engines.

Benefits of Link Popularity

The first benefit of having many pages link to yours is the traffic you will get from those links! Before the search engines became so hot and bothered about links, websites generated traffic to their sites from other links. The second and more important factor of link popularity is gaining high rankings in the search engines! Most of the major search engines such as google, msn, hotbot, and altavista base a large part of the algorithmns on the amount of links pointing to your webpage and what those links say about your page. You will get a huge boost in your search engine ranking if you have strong link popularity and if the linktext in those links match the keyword being searched for. For example if someone searched google for jewelry and you had a thousand sites pointing to yours with jewelry in the linktext, then you have a great chance of ranking well. It is important to note to make sure you don't always use the same linktext when requesting link exchanges or you may be filtered out as spam. You should use a varitety of different variations of your keywords in your linktext.

How To Increase Link Popularity

The first thing you should do if you want to build link popularity is set up a reciprocal link page. This is a page added to your website where you will put your link partner's links. Once you have this setup, you can then start searching the web for potential link partners. For example go to google and search out sites similar to your own, find their contact information and send them an email requesting a trade. It is wise to personalize the email and let them know you have actually visited their site. Try to trade with sites that are relevant to your own but not your direct competitors. For exmaple a web design firm would benefit from trading with a web hosting or internet marketing company. Try to gain as many relevant partners as you can and do not put more then 50 links on a link page. Once you hit 50 links, start another one for the next 50.

Google Pagerank

An important factor to consider when trading links is a website's pagerank. Google ranks each website and gives it a pagerank from 1 - 10 with 10 being the highest. In order to see a site's pagerank you will need to download the google toolbar and select the pagerank option. Got to google for more info on their toolbar. Once you have the toolbar installed you can see each site's pagerank. Try to trade with sites that have a similar or better pagerank than your own. For more information on pagerank please read Google Pagerank.