Link popularity

Having good link popularity is an important part of your overall traffic building campaign. If your not familiar with the concept, link popularity is an expression of the popularity of your web site, determined by how many other sites are linked to yours. The more links you have, the higher the ranking you'll be given by search engines that employ this algorithm. The rationale behind link popularity is that the more inbound links you have pointing to your web site the more worthwhile and valuable your site must be, after all logically no one links to a worthless site!

Apart from the added value search engines give your inbound links with regards to their ranking algorithms, there is the bonus of the increased traffic that will come from these linked sites. A "win-win" situation

How do I find out how many links my site has

In order to determine how many links your site has or how many links a competitors web page has and where they're getting links from you need a way to query the search engines. Below is a list of some of the big search engines, with the syntax needed to do a link popularity search

Go to any of the search engines below type in the correct search string e.g. on AltaVista you might type in the search box - link:www.yoursite.co.uk

AltaVista (link:www.yourdomain)
Google (link:www.yourdomain)
Lycos (link:www.yourdomain)
AOL (linkdomain:yourdomain)
MSN (linkdomain:yourdomain)
HotBot (linkdomain:yourdomain)
AllTheWeb (link:yourdomain)

Reciprocal link building: Where do I start?

A link campaign should always begin with a portal link audit to find out where the site is and isn't listed. Once that is done and you've filled the gaps in the main search engines and directories you can get down to some serious link building

Have a look at your competition and see what sort of link relationship density they have, also look at where they are getting their links from, odds are that you could probably link there too

Type in your main keyword (which should be included in your title and body text) into most any search engine and ask for sites that will accept your link for free like this: keyword + add url - this will bring up pages of sites and directories that will give you an inbound link

After you have done this now try: keyword + links pages - this will bring up all the sites that are of the same theme as your own that have links pages and either submit or e-mail the webmasters and request a link

How many links do I need?

Most search engine optimisation techniques have a compromising factor, overdo the placing of keywords in a particular place, let's say in your meta-tags, and you leave yourself open to the possible charge of spamming (by some but not necessarily all the search engines). Link popularity strategies are not hindered by such limitations, the more links the more powerful the effect

Although having lots of links to your site is your ultimate aim, there is a need to address the quality of the links that point towards your site. The two factors that contribute towards this quality are the ranking of the site that links to you and the relevance that site has to yours (a site selling rubber ducks linking to a search engine optimisation company is an example of a link with no relevancy)

How do you determine a sites quality?

Google which is considered one of the most influential search engines on the web uses a system known as Pageranking. This is a method by which each page it indexes is given a rank, with a value range of 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest

So how do you get a high page rank? By having as many sites linking to you that are relevant and already have a high page rank. To find out what a sites pagerank is download the Google toolbar. This is a handy free search tool that sits at the top of your browser and not only allows you to do quick searches but also returns useful information, such as the pagerank of the selected page

The usefulness of pageranking information becomes apparent when you realise that the value of the pages that link to you is more important than the number of pages that link to you. 100 pages with a pagerank of 1 pointing to you won't be as good as 10 pages with a pagerank of 7 pointing to you. Using the Google toolbar allows you to check the importance of any site you'd like to get a link from, allows you to focus your efforts on the most worthy candidates

The importance of quality links

One of the worst sources for links can be Free For All pages, more commonly known as FFA pages. These pages or sites are a good idea in theory but in practice are more trouble than they're worth. Working in a similar fashion to a directory, you submit your sites url and then have a link placed on the page, usually at the top but getting replaced by the next entry and gradually being pushed down the page until it gets pushed completely off

The problem with this is that you can get pushed off the directory before the search engines spider the FFA page and index the links. You also have a non relevant link, which the search engines will not reward highly. Some search engines may give you no credit for certain FFA pages as they do not truly follow the spirit of the scheme.

As if that wasn't enough some FFA pages or sites are set up to collect your e-mail address for the purpose of spamming you later. Ultimately these types of pages are a poor source of links and the quality of visitor traffic is amongst among the worst you can get i.e. extremely un-targeted

reciprocal link building tips