Site or link popularity is also called a site's significance ranking, because it is believed that one measure of a site's "value" is the number and importance of other web sites which felt your site was significant enough to link to.
If important and authoritative sites in your focus area link to you, chances are your site is relatively important as well. The popularity of the sites that link to you can also play a role.
Example
For instance, if you run your link popularity checking software, you would find that at least 1,280,148 Web sites link to the IBM (www.ibm.com) website in Lycos/AllTheWeb's index (as of September 13, 2003). In certain search engines, IBM would achieve better rankings with all other factors being equal.
However, this is only one factor, and you can certainly achieve high rankings without being linked to from thousands of other sites.
In fact,
it's not the sheer number of links you should focus on, but the number of links from popular and authoritative sites in your topic area.
And,
focus on the link text that is being used to describe your site from those sites linking to yours. This is called your site's (or page's) link reputation.
How to improve your site's link popularity
- 1) Contact other sites in your focus area and ask them to link to your site. To encourage them to link to you, you could offer to link back to their site, which is called "reciprocal linking." Because of the importance of link reputation, be sure to give them the link text you want used when linking to your site.
And, be sure to use your important keyword phrase in the link text.
-2) To find sites in your focus area, use a software like Arelis by Axandra. You might be surprised of the number of webmasters you can get in touch with
-3) You can also visit a search engine like Google and type:
"submit a link" "your keyword phrase"
Example:
"submit a link" "home schooling"
You'll be shown search results that contain pages that allow you to "submit a link" under the topic of "home schooling," which again might be good link partners for you.
- 4) For a listing of over 125 ways to build your site's link popularity, read this article that offers tips from industry leaders and SEO's.
Link Popularity Check Software
However, you can get a software (i.e. Link Popularity Check)
to send you a report of your current link popularity standings in MSN, Lycos/AllTheWeb, and AltaVista on a weekly, twice a month,
or monthly basis.
Important tip
One important thing to remember regarding link popularity is that numbers aren't absolute. A site may be linking to you, but if the engine hasn't spidered the page and found the link, your site won't get "credit" for that link. Also, link popularity often fluctuates considerably.
So, rather than considering your link popularity as an absolute number, consider it as a guide, and
- 1) work toward increasing the number of popular and authoritative sites that link to your site.
And,
- 2) make sure that they describe your site using your important keyword phrase, in order to build your site's link reputation.
For more detailed information see
