Many Web marketing veterans have long
realized the value of improving link popularity. For those
of you new to this term, link popularity is how many external
links on the Web point to your own Web site. Therefore,
if you have 205 Web pages on other Web site domains pointing
to your domain, then your link popularity is 205. Your
link popularity will vary on each search engine because
each engine has a different set of pages in its index.
You can easily check your current link popularity for
at our new service on the MarketPosition Web site:
http://www.marketposition.com/linkpopularity.htm
This service will quickly compare your
link popularity across four major search engines. It will
also compare your site to up to three other Web sites
that you designate. This is a handy feature to see how
you stack up against your competition. It's also great
to find out who is linking to you. You may be surprised
at what you find!
The link service displays colored graphs so that you can
visually compare your popularity scores for different
search engines or different Web sites. In addition, you
can have your link popularity report e-mailed to you weekly,
twice a month, or monthly if you wish. I've reviewed other
link checking services on the Web, and this one is by
far the best one I've seen. Be sure to bookmark it!
So what are the advantages of increasing the number of
links to your Web site? There are three primary benefits:
1. The more sites that link to you, the
more traffic you can expect to receive to your site. People
find nearly as many Web sites by following links from
one Web site to another as they do by using the search
engines. Some well-placed links to your Web site can be
great long-term traffic generators.
2. More and more major search engines
will rank your pages higher when you have many links to
your Web site (i.e., your link popularity). Higher search
rankings, of course, translate into greater traffic.
3. The more links to your site, the more
ways search engine spiders have for finding you each week.
Therefore, you tend to stay indexed longer and are less
frequently dropped from the index.
Link Popularity Tips:
1. The more links you have to your site,
the better.
2. Some engines favor links from popular
sites. Therefore, a few links from Web sites with a high
link popularity score may be given greater importance
than a larger number of links from less popular sites.
3. Some engines boost rankings for a
keyword when they find links to a site that include the
targeted keywords in the linking text.
This question is commonly asked: Is the
link popularity based on the number of links to a domain
or to a particular page? All the evidence I've seen indicates
that it's generally based on the links to a domain rather
than to each page. However, the search engines appear
to make exceptions to this rule for domains that host
many virtual Web sites in subdirectories.
This is minimal given the numerous benefits
you gain. You might also avoid hosting your important
doorway pages in subdirectories whenever possible. That
way you avoid giving the search engine the impression
that you are sharing a domain with a thousand other Web
sites.
With that said, the question still remains:
How do you improve your link popularity? There are many
strategies. I'll discuss each of the major methods so
you can choose what's right for you.
Trading Links
This is by far the oldest
and best-known method of improving link popularity. Basically
you e-mail or contact the Webmaster of a site that is
complementary but generally not competitive to your own.
You ask them to link to your site while outlining the
benefits of doing so. You would generally offer to link
back to them in exchange for this courtesy.
The disadvantage to the
link trade method is that it's time consuming. You'll
also find that far more people will ignore or reject your
request versus those that accept it AND follow through
by adding the link to you. Many of these people get e-mails
every week from people asking to trade links. These Webmasters
are also going to be very hesitant about linking to another
Web site and potentially sending their own hard-earned
traffic away to somebody else. Most people will refuse
to link to you unless they're convinced that they'll receive
more traffic from you than they'll send away, or that
there's some other advantage to them