Link Popularity is simply total number of pages that link to your website. Most search engines, including Google, consider that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote of confidence for other page. Therefore, likelihood of you being best source of information for their searchers is directly linked to number of votes you have. It is therefore safe to assume that higher number of pages linking to your website, higher you will be ranked on search engines. Link popularity has become a critical success factor for search engine optimization within popular search engines.

How does link popularity work?

Good link popularity is important because it can boost your rankings within search engines, increasing number of visitors to your website. There are 3 important factors to keep in mind:

Relevancy

An incoming link is considered to be relevant if it relates to your web page. For example, if you sell office furniture online, relevant incoming links could include: furniture manufacturers, interior designers, competitors in other states or countries, etc.

Keywords

Here you'll find a list of some of most powerful SEO tools available, all of them free and wildly useful in helping you increase traffic and link popularity.

Any good SEO needs to keep track of his or her keyword rankings, and an excellent resource is goya-rank.com. The site is completely ad-free and with a few clicks you can determine your search engine rankings in yahoo, google, and msn for any keyword across multiple datacenters.

Also featured is a backlink traffic tool to monitor link popularity.