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This article will show you the importance of link popularity and how to improve your

webpage's

link popularity utilizing a few different techniques.

Link popularity simply is the number of links that point to a webpage

and is a crucial factor

used by almost all of the search engines to rank websites.

Link Popularity importance

With the every increasingly popularity of Google, web site owners

marketing efforts have had to change to accommodate what Google is

looking for in a quality site. One way to prove that you have a

quality site has been with link popularity. Good quality

incoming links

coupled with good quality page content will bring highly targeted

traffic, and a lot of it. Just keep in mind that quality is key.

The saying less is more really applies here. Just because your

website has five hundred incoming links doesn't mean that they are all

relevant. Ensure that the links you are getting are relevant to

the content that your page is offering. This is extremely

important.

Tips to Improving link Popularity

1. Directory Listings: Ensure your site is listed in the Open

Directory Project (ODP)

and also in Yahoo's Business Express ($299 yearly) and LookSmart

Express Submit ($299) or Basic Submit ($149). Directory listings boost

popularity because they rely on human editors, known to only select

relevant websites. You may also try searching for other

directories to submit to. Do a search for "search engine

directories".

2. Cross Linking:

Or you may hear it referred to as internal linking. Make sure you cross link your important related pages. This

technique tells the search engines that these are the more important

pages within your website therefore they will increase in ranking.

Cross linking your pages also helps the search engines find and index

your most important pages quicker, especially if you have hundreds of

pages and some of them are four and five levels deep. Internal

linking is a great way to increase the amount of keywords in your visual

text links.

3. Publish articles: Write up some informative articles your

audience is interested in, then submit these articles to online

publications in your industry. Provide a brief bio which includes

your web sites URL and make a condition that the article must be

published intact with your bio. Over a short period of time you

should gather some quality links.

4. Request Links:

Open up an Excel spreadsheet and list all of the possible linking

partners that you have gathered.

Now that you have a list of possible link partners put a link on your

site to their site and then email each site owner telling them that

you've linked to them and respectfully ask them to link back to you in return. You would be surprised by the amount of response

you get. Make it as easy as possible for the other site to link to

you. I've found a that actually providing a form so the site owner

can just copy and paste your link code into their site makes linking to

you extremely easy. This can save a lot email-tag for the both of

you.

Two Important Factors

There are essentially two important factors in increasing your

webpage's link popularity. Studies have shown that the quality of

the link is just as important as the number of incoming links to your

site.

1. Quality of link - Link popularity will skyrocket

when popular sites link you such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project

(ODP). These sites are considered authoritive sites and receive a

high amount of traffic. Also, you should concentrate on getting

links from major search engines such as Google, MSN, and also sites that

relate to your sites theme/content. Most search engines will see

your website in a much higher light if you have a incoming link from a

major search engine, thus greatly increasing free search engine traffic.

Try to find websites that link to your competition. This does a

couple of things for you. First and utmost you know that links to

your competition usually will be relevant and on topic. Also, this will

greatly reduce the amount of time you have to invest in finding incoming

links.

Finding sites that link to your competition is actually quit easy.

Try typing "link" and then the competitors domain name like this:

"link:www.competitors-domain.com."

Another technique in finding quality links is by finding sites that offer

site submissions. Go to Google and type in:

"add url" "your keyword phrase"

Also try replacing, "add url" with any other these search phrases::

add site, add link, add a url, add a site, add a link, submit url, submit site, submit link, submit a url, submit a site, submit a link.

2. Keywords in Link

Another very important factor is the keyword being used to link to your site.

When asking a site owner to link to your site make sure that you ask

them to link with the keyword that you are optimizing that page for. Keywords are very important in determining the relevancy of your webpage so

ensure that they are sprinkled throughout them as well.

Nearly 25 percent of the #1 web pages on Google result pages used the queried keyword in link texts.

For example, if the keyword is "computers", the following link text contains the keyword once:


Computers

Nearly one out of four web pages is a very high number so it looks like Google ranks web pages higher if they contain keywords in their link texts.

If you would like to automate your link building efforts, I recommend

using a link management tool such as Arelis.

It will save much time, I know it has for me :)