How To Increase The Link Popularity Of Your Web Site.

For example, if you only had one other web site linking to your site, then your link popularity would be one. In other words link popularity is a measure of how may other sites are willing to "vote" for your site by adding a link to it.

Is Link Popularity Important?

Yes. Search engines have a hard job when it comes to deciding what search results to return. They attempt to return the most relevant results that are contained in their database. One significant problem that the search engines have is how to decide which web sites are best, which they basically do by calculating both the relevance of a site and its popularity.

To determine relevancy the search engines look at a number of on page factors, such as your title tag, your description and the keyword density. To determine the popularity of your web site they look at how many links point to it. Most search engines work on the assumption that the more links a web site has pointing towards it, the better it must be.

How Do I Check My Link Popularity

You can check your link popularity in a number of ways. You can use the link: command in Google. For example you can type the following in to the Google search box to check which web sites are linking to you. Forexample if I wanted to check the popularity of my own "Testing & Tracking" site I would simply enter: www.Test-and-Track.com

The problem with this command is that it only shows web site that have a PageRank above a pre-determined value (Assumed to be a PR of 4 and above). However, this doesn't mean that the links which aren't returned by Google don't count towards your link popularity, because they do.

One of my favourite resources for checking Link Popularity is the Marketleap Link Check Tool - www.marketleap.com/publinkpop This web based tool allows you to check your link popularity as determined by a number of different search engines.

How Do I Improve Link Popularity?

Increasing your link popularity is, theoretically, very simple. All you have to do is increase the number of links that point to your web site. There are several ways of achieving this including submitting your web sites to directories, adding your site to link exchange, contacting other site owners and by distributing articles.

The most popular directories include DMOZ, Yahoo! and JoeAnt and there are many others including a lot of specialist directories that focus on just one theme. If you are looking for links to your niche site, submitting to specialists sites within the theme of your niche is well worth the effort.

A Link exchange is based on the 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back' principle and is an easy way of increasing your link popularity. In exchange for a web site providing a link to you, you agree to link back to them. Usually both web sites will place their link on some sort of links directory page. As a result both web sites each receive a vote.

Submitting articles is an excellent strategy. Webmasters and newsletter publishers are always looking for good quality content and having your article publisher on web sites and newsletter archives will earn you a lot of relevant incoming links.

The real secret of building your link popularity is to keep up the momentum. Do something every day that increases the popularity of your site. remember every link that points to your site can be clicked by a prospect and the more prospects you can get to your site, the more sales you will make!

Copyright John Taylor PhD August 2005 - All rights reserved.

About The Author: To learn more information about Link Popularity I strongly recommend that you visit www.Link-Advantage.com