Link Popularity BasicsWritten by JC Anderl
Link popularity has recently become an important aspect to consider when promoting a website. Many search engines have started to use link popularity to help determine ranking in their listings. Gaining links from other sites is also very beneficial because you gain added traffic when users follow link from another site to your site.What Is Link Popularity? Link popularity is basically number and quality of links that point towards your site. A link from a very important site is worth more than a link from a smaller site. The search engine companies think that an important site would only link to your site if your site was important, and it makes sense too. Try getting main page of Yahoo! to link to you and you'll fail, but if you did get a link, then your site must be worth something. You couldn't even get a link to your site from a medium size site unless your site was important enough and had something to offer. Both of which are important aspects in determining relevancy - a search engines main goal. The number of links is also important for same reason. Your site must be important if many sites link to you. Search engines know these things, and that is basis for link popularity. Linking Strategy Rules The most basic way of gather and exchanging links is to simply visit websites and email webmaster asking for a link exchange. However, there are a few rules to keep in mind. 1. Related, Not Competitive - You should try to focus your linking strategy on sites related to yours, but not in direct competition. For example, a search engine submission company site wouldn't want to link with a competitor. They would be better off linking with a website that teaches various ways of promotion. The object is not to lose business to competitors, but to gain business from similar sites.
| | Quick Introduction to Link PopularityWritten by Alan Grissett
If you are new to Web site promotion, you might not have heard of link popularity before, but in some respects, it's single most important factor for good ranking in search engines. Before covering link popularity, a brief overview of how search engines operate is in order.Because of vast number of files and documents on Web, there is an inherent need for some method of indexing and searching for documents. Search engines and directories fill this need to varying degrees of success. Pure search engines differ from directories in that they do not use human editors to add to their directories; they use software to "crawl" through links in documents to find other documents to add to their indexes. Historically, these engines based ranking of individual documents on factors such as keyword placement (where a keyword appears on a page), keyword density (how many times a keyword appears on a page), and use of special HTML tags known as META tags. Because these factors were easily manipulated by Webmasters, a high ranking could often be achieved for pages of little or no value. New methods of ranking pages were needed to achieve better results.
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