Link popularity refers to popularizing your website link for top web rankings on popular search engines. At present, link popularity has become one of the most significant techniques of search engine optimization. This means that a high ranking is just impossible without link popularity. You can measure your online responses and visibility through a link popularity checker tool. This software program is helpful in reflecting the total number of links to a site and allows you to track the site’s relevance and searching status in the search engines.

Importance Of Checking The Link Popularity Of Your Site.

The number of links pointing to your website is one of the major factors to know the popularity of the website. More links means popularity in search engines thereby making the website easy to be located by the target audience. So, needless to say the more the link is popular, the more will be the traffic in your website. With a link popularity checker software program, you can get more opportunities and chances to convert the visitors into buyers.

How To Improve The Link Popularity Of A Website?

There are some points of consideration that are necessary while building quality links for a website:

• Directory listings: These help in boosting the link popularity as they usually rely upon human editors and are known to produce relevant content.
• Request links: Select some websites that may receive your link requests and then send them a convincing reason to link back to your website. They can be interested in building one-way or reciprocal links both of which are very effective in increasing link popularity.
• Promoting links within the site: Basically, a website can provide outgoing links and quality resources which may include search engines, weather reports, news hubs, professional groups and industry resources. Outgoing links may provide incentives for other sites to link to your site.
• Publishing articles: Hire professional experts for writing informative articles for your target audience. Then submit the articles to the appropriate publications as per your type of industry. You should also provide a short introduction to your company and make sure that the article gets published over the Internet with your company URL in it. While this strategy can take a lot of time and skills from your end, these can generate many links to your site.
• Testimonials: It is worthwhile to have a page of testimonials for products and services that you offer. Be concise and honest and the companies will definitely ask for your permission to display your statements on their websites. In return, you can ask them to provide a link to your website, thus, you will not only gain exposure to the world but will also get more links.

How Is The Link Popularity Checker Software Helpful?

With the help of a link popularity checker software program, you will be able to constantly track your linking rate. You can also compare your website with your competitor’s websites thereby finding out ways to improve the ranking of your websites.

You can use a link popularity checker software program for having a good supervision, management and maintenance system for your links. Quality and quantity go hand in hand and therefore, only the number of links pointing to your site is not sufficient. Less number of good links is better than a large number of unproductive links.

Article Written By: Tom Dahne

In this article I’ll try to demystify Link Popularity and PageRank, or PR, clarify some common misconceptions and tell you how things work, in plain English, with facts and examples.

Link Popularity is based on the premise that people link to good sites, and if a lot of people link to your site, then it must be good. In plain English, if other sites are linking to your site, your site is popular, therefore it is useful and deserves a boost in rankings, so people can find it faster and easier.

Link Popularity is not specific to Google only, but was adopted by the vast majority of Search Engines.

Link Popularity is only one of the many factors (good content, number of pages, text, anchors, internal links, static URLs, keywords, meta tags, and many, many others) that are used in calculating your place in a search result page (ultimately, this is what all of it is about – how findable you are in a search).

PageRank (PR) is specific to Google and is a trademarked proprietary algorithm. There are many variables in the formulas used by Google, but PageRank is primarily affected by the number of links pointing to the page, the number of internal links pointing to the page within the site and the number of pages in the site.

PageRank focuses strictly on the quantity of links and is directly influenced by the PageRank of the pages that are linked.

In Google, Link Popularity puts more emphasis on the quality of links (ex. links from sites related to yours by topic or by industry rank much higher than links from non-related sites).

PageRank – as the name suggests – is specific to a web page, not to a web site. Every page on your site has a PageRank and every one is different, based mostly on your linking system. Generally – but not always – the goal is to achieve maximum PageRank on your main page, the one people hit when first entering your site.

You can check the PR of a page by installing the Google toolbar in Internet Explorer (the “official” way), a PR checker extension in Firefox, or by using one of the many online utilities, such as the one at [http://www.bsleek.com/tools/link_popularity.php] (which also checks Link Popularity and presence in DMOZ).

In Google only, PageRank is one of the factors that influence Link Popularity.

PageRank (PR), developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University is considered to be the heart of Google’s software. PageRank solves an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives and by the PR of the page which casts the vote.

There are two types of incoming links that can effectively contribute to increasing your Link Popularity:

1. Links from other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases you do. In other words, if a site that can be found in search engines by using a search phrase like “corporate cd-rom presentations” links to your site, and your site actually specializes in designing interactive media, like CDs or DVDs, then that link will help your Link Popularity. But if your site is about selling onions, then the mentioned link will be useless.
2. Links from relevant categories in major directories industry-specific directories and portals. The most important major directory is DMOZ (who feeds data to many others) and is the toughest to get in. Submission is free and there are actually people reviewing your site. The waiting times are in the months order, so my advice is submit and forget. The industry-specific directories are very important. For example, if you make interactive media, and list your site in a directory dedicated to graphic design or media under the appropriate category, then search engines like Google will pick that up as an incoming link and will increase your Link Popularity. Listing your site in such a directory is very useful to your potential visitors, and this is what Google is trying to emulate with its software. Remember, with Google and many others, there are no humans reviewing your pages, but software acting under very specific and strict rules (algorithms).

Search engines are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so important. If the customers can’t find your website, you won’t make sales.

You might be wondering, “What is popular about a link!” Plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, how do I make my link popular?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple recipe, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more popular tour keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on the search engines. But don’t be discouraged; there are ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” – pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have any problem about your visitors seeing. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve high link popularity and improve your rankings on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company sells Goats Milk from a farm located in the middle of Whoop Whoop, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Goat Product” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have acquired directory listings is to locate other quality related sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Goats Milk site example. Linking up to a site that sells Goats Milk recipes would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of this site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects – and both of your sites’ link popularity.

Link popularity is the single most influential factor for determining how well a web site will perform in search engine rankings. A web site’s link popularity is computed from the number and more importantly, the quality of links pointing to a web site.

Link Popularity history

To gain a better understanding of link popularity it is useful to know why it became so crucial for search engine rankings. In the past a web page’s ranking was determined, amongst other factors, by the number of keyword occurrences within ‘on-page’ elements i.e. in page text, META tags, title tag.

When web developers learned that they could trick a search engine to return their web pages by cramming keywords into their pages the search engines had to get a bit smarter. They were using ‘on-page’ elements to determine relevance so it was only natural that they would look to elements out of direct control of the web page creator i.e. ‘off-page’ elements. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a web site, the more popular the web site is and therefore a more quality resource. This worked nicely in theory but in practice it was also to be abused.

Web site owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their web sites one example of which was through the use of link farms, pages the contained nothing more than a collection of links, Quantity of links was being abused so the search engines made use of the old saying “quality not quantity” and began to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a web site. Now web sites that had a higher number of high quality links were looked upon favourably by the search engines. Building link popularity became a science in itself and today is still the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for a search engine optimizer.

Main classes of links

Note: In the following examples SiteA is our web site and SiteB is an outside site (i.e. a web site under a different domain name than SiteA).

Inbound links:

Inbound links to a web site are links that originate from an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteB pointing into a page on SiteA.

SiteA (—– SiteB

Outbound links:

Outbound links from a web site are links pointing to a page on an outside web site. An example would be a link on SiteA pointing out to a page on SiteB.

SiteA —–) SiteB

There are two further classifications of links:

Reciprocal links:

An example of a reciprocal link is when SiteA links to SiteB AND SiteB links to SiteA, the link is reciprocated by both parties.

SiteA —–) SiteB

AND

SiteA (—– SiteB

To achieve a high link popularity the type of links to build are inbound one-way links. This simulates how natural links are created i.e. links that people create to point to your site because they found it worth linking to.

For outbound links it is natural to assume that they might decrease link popularity of a web site but this is not true. You do not give away your link popularity when you link to another site. They do not add to your link popularity though.

Reciprocal links can add to your link popularity if the web site that you exchange links with has a higher link popularity than your site. However they are not as powerful as inbound, one-way links as they are quite artificial in nature i.e. most probably created by communication between the owners of both sites.

Link popularity is a popular trend in the Internet marketing world, however, not everybody are provided or are knowledgeable about the truth in some areas of building search engine optimization. Some can lead you in the dark with your link building method when inapplicable or untrue process is followed. Link popularity analyzer has been developed by people or companies that desire to aide in stopping the nonsense some give for newly started website owners. With some free link popularity checker, you may be given some idea on how effective your link popularity technique really is in helping your online marketing.

Can link popularity be free?

It is true that link popularity is offered free, nevertheless, since website developing is a marketing and advertising which mainly produces ways to generate money for owners, free link popularity is hard to find nowadays, unless of course the owner will be the one to develop the website’s own links.

Getting involved with the free link popularity strategies offered by others may mess up your website popularity rating. Therefore, to get quality links that will provide good reputation and popularity in the search engines directories, handling it personally may be better for a website owner to do.

What are the Myths in Link Popularity Development?

• Guarantee on being included in the top ten of search engines

This is not true and is just highly a marketing strategy for the service providers of link popularity developers. This is so since only the search engines can dictate your rating and not the ones who develop your links. It will all depend on the good work they do for your website which the search engines will rate.

• SEO in-house is cheaper

This is not true. You will have to spend valuable hours to do your own website optimization. With all the time you have to spend, more fruitful things could have been done with professionals working for your popularity rating, with affordable cost only.

• Leads on search engines are worth less than others

Search engines are the best leads because these came from people all over the world using the Internet and no other leads have a wide lead to confirm the analysis on website rate on popularity of your website contents.

• Simple Insertion of keywords in meta tag will list your site in that keyword
  Spam will be developed in your site without the keywords found in the content of the site itself.

There are more myths fed to the users of the Internet in link development, some may be effective in your popularity ranking. However, they may produce bad reputation on your part like spamming. Looking for the best link popularity analyzer and a link building service that does not apply these myths may help your company online to kick off on the marketing and advertising of your products.

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