Link Popularity

Wednesday, 8th September 2010 - Search Engine Optimization

Link popularity has become a very important factor for high search engine rankings. Generally speaking, link popularity is the number of other web sites that link to your web site.

The more other web sites link to your web site, the higher your search engine rankings will be. The idea behind this concept is that search engines think that your web site must be important if many other web sites link to your site.

But be warned, the number of links alone is not enough to improve your search engine rankings. It is also important that the other web sites are related to your web site. Links from unrelated web sites won’t do your own web site much good. If the links to your web site include your important keywords in the link text, the effect on your search engine rankings will be much higher.

If you want to be found for the search term “home loans” then it’s much better to get links like:

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Home Loans</a>
and
www.example.com/home-loans-australia.html

Than having your links look like this:

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Mac & McCoy Inc</a>

If the link to your site includes your search term, search engines assume that your web site must be relevant for the search term used.

High link popularity alone won’t bring you high search engine rankings. Your web site content must also be optimized for search engines. It doesn’t make sense to get many incoming links if your web site lacks content. If the search engines find that the links to your web site and your web site’s content matches, they will give your web site preference for higher search engine rankings for its topic.

Search engines use the following factors to determine the rank of your web site:

  • The content of your web site must be optimized for search engines while being attractive to web site visitors.
  • The number and the quality of links to your web site (the links should be on web sites that are related or similar to your web sites theme or content and they should contain your important keywords).
  • A combination of optimized web page content and good link popularity leads to high search engine rankings.
  • It is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for a web page with optimized content that does not have good link popularity.
  • It is difficult to get high search engine rankings for a web page with good link popularity that has no optimized content.