SEARCH ENGINES

Link Popularity

Link popularity is a major factor in search engine optimization. Link popularity involves gathering other websites relevant to your own and having them link to your site to raise the value of your content. Usually in return you will link back to them as a courtesy. This can be a very labor-intensive task, but the payoff is excellent. This link popularity is usually the best way to attract the search engines. With a link popularity campaign, we are researching other sites that are directly related to the target site. For instance, within the real estate realm, there are many other sites already in place that are very popular with both the general public and the search engines. Those sites may be mortgage companies, appraisal companies, or any of the many other community dedicated sites that are usually in place. These sites are very popular with the search engines and are visited often to update their listing and search for new content. When the search engines come to visit, they follow each link coming out of that site. After you have convinced that site that you can be a valuable link for them and they place you on their site, the search engine will follow that link right to your site. There is great importance in having that link from a site that is both popular and directly related to your industry. The search engines (in their increasing wisdom) can now tell that the two sites are related and place more value on that link. By being related to a site that is both highly popular and directly related, you have effectively raised the importance and popularity of your own site.

So, how do you know if a site is popular or not? Well, probably the best way to see that is to download Google’s tool bar. On their tool bar, they have what is called a “Page Rank” indicator. Google’s Page Rank indicator will tell you on a scale of 0 to 10 how popular, relevant, and well linked the page of that site is. Notice that I said “page of that site”. Each page of a site is ranked separately. The reason this is important to know is that when you are putting together a link popularity campaign, you will want to know exactly where your link will be showing up on their site. Yes, the front page of their site may have a great Page Rank, but when you go to their “links” page, it has a big fat zero. Ultimately, that link will be worthless for you. There are sites with literally hundreds of links coming in that do not rank as highly as other similar sites with five good links. Therefore, quality definitely overshadows quantity in this area.

Just remember that good, relative links are very hard to find. Don’t be surprised if you do not get more than 2-3 a month. That is just fine as long as they are quality links. Remember too that there is a real person on the other end of this transaction who must actively add your link to their page. That alone can take some time.

The final point to cover in link popularity is internal linking. This is simple to complete, but is very necessary for optimizing for the search engines. Internal linking is simply a method of linking all of your website’s pages together. This is usually accomplished with a “site map” page. The reason this is important is when the search engines do come in from your outside links, you will want to make sure they see every page of your site. The more content they see within your site, the more relevant they will consider you.