Before we begin this special link building guide, I want to make sure I have your full attention. What I'm about to
teach you will be the foundation for all of your websites. If you follow the steps outlined, you will be able to quickly build your link popularity. Which, I can promise you will lead to MUCH higher search engine rankings.
If you're not serious about your website and business, please don't waste your time by reading this guide. Only procede if you're serious about getting top rankings and will put into practice everything you're about to learn.
With that being said, let's get right to it!
Link Popularity is a much misunderstood topic among webmasters and online business owners. In the quest for search engine rankings, link popularity has quickly developed into the single-most important tool for improving your rankings, and in the process, increasing your profits.
This guide is a brief stroll inside the world of link popularity. In it I've tried to cover the different aspects and perspectives of link popularity, including what works, what doesn't work, and what the future of link popularity holds for online business owners like you and me who depend on search engine traffic for the success of their business.
I'll give you a quick definition of what link popularity is, and then move on to talk about why it is so important, and how it is essentially determined.
● A measure of the number of web pages that link to your site.
Quite simply, link popularity is the number of incoming links to your website. You can say that link popularity is just a part of what search engines look at when they examine the back links of a website, and this is how it looks.
The importance of the linking website is a central pillar of search engine rankings. In other words, all links are not created equal. A link from an "important" website carries more weight than a link from a low-key, not-so-important website. On the other hand, as I've said above.
Any link, no matter how non-related OR what their Page Rank is, is better than having no link at all. You should always accept link from anyone that's willing to trade, unless of course, they are penalized and have a "gray" Google PR as shown above.
So how does link popularity figure into all this?
Search engines have ONE sole purpose:
To provide users with the most relevant content (relevant to what they are searching for) that is ranked by its quality.
In pursuit of this goal, search engines have developed sophisticated algorithms that rank web pages for relevancy and quality. In determining relevancy, search engines tend to measure on-page factors such as relevant content - on-page optimization is dedicated towards improving your website's relevancy in the eyes of search engines.
For determining quality, search engines have moved towards inbound links and their quality as a measure of a website's importance or quality. Why is this?
Much of this move has to do with Google's Page Rank algorithm. The concept is simple: Links are the easiest and most impartial methods of determining how popular a website or a web page is. Taken in reverse, this also means that quality resources will eventually be the most popular, thus making links a direct factor in influencing the search engine's "quality" ratings for any website.
The rise of link popularity (as a measure of the links pointing to a website) in search engine optimization is founded on the principle that great sites will naturally attract many links, and content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. While this has been badly abused by black-hat SEO techniques, the fact remains that the system is correct in principle, and search engines are continuously working to remove problems that rise because of dubious and unethical optimization techniques.
While Google was and is the frontrunner in giving importance to link-popularity (and with Google serving ~ 50 percent of the search engine traffic, you'd be hard pressed to find a reason NOT to build links), other major search engines such as Yahoo, MSN Search and AltaVista have also given importance to link popularity, making it a critical component of your search engine strategy.