SEO - The Importance of Link Popularity

Gone are the days when well chosen title tags and META tags were enough to give your website a good search engine ranking. Today, the search engines use much more complex algorithms when ranking your website, and so the search engine optimization process has become more complicated.

One of the chief things the search engines look at when ranking your website is its link popularity. Basically, link popularity depends on the number and the quality of websites linking to your site.

Having good links to your website has two chief advantages. The first is that these links will drive traffic directly to your website. Second, links to your website will boost the popularity of your site with search engines.

So when you think about search engine optimization, one of the first things you should do is check how many websites are linking to your site, and determine the quality of the links. A link from a popular website will be much more valuable than a link from one with little traffic.

You can perform this check yourself by typing 'link:www.yourdomainname.com' into any of the search engines. Of course, you use the url of your own website. This should return a list of all the websites that link to your site. If you get poor results, it may be time to start thinking about a link building campaign.

There are a number of ways in which you can get links to your website included on other websites. By far the most valuable are natural links, where other sites link to you by choice because they like your content and/or the product you sell.

You could also consider having your website listed on some of the popular directories. This is an ongoing process, as your website will usually disappear from the directory after a couple of days.

You could also try submitting articles that are relevant to your website to article directories. Other websites can use these articles for free, but must also publish a short description of your service and a link to your website at the bottom of the article. If you can write good content that people will want to publish, this can be a good way of creating one-way links to your website.

Reciprocal links are another option, where you and another website owner agree to publish links to each other's sites. This can increase link popularity, but also may drive traffic away from your website.

These are just some of the ways to increase link popularity. You could also consider pay per click ads, social media marketing or some other method.

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