Improving Link Popularity of Your Website

- By the SearchEngineOptimizationPromotion.com team

Link popularity is of tremendous importance in search engine ranking of your Website. Link popularity is total number of links that link to a site.

Suppose you are owner of a site abc.com. Somebody came across your site and quite liked it. Lets assume he/she also owns a site called xyz.com. Now the owner of the site xyz.com decides that he/she will link to your site abc.com telling their visitors that it's a good site and that they must visit it.

Assuming that both site have been indexed by the search engines - the search engines will count this link to your site as a "vote" for your site. Lets suppose a few more site owners visited your site, got impressed and decided to link to your site. This way lets assume 100 sites link to your site. Now the search engines will count these 100 links to your site as 100 sites voting for your site.

Why do the search engines give importance to sites that have more incoming links from other sites? This is based on a simple concept. Search engines think that because a lot of sites are linking to a site, it should be a good site and hence deserve a good search engine ranking. It means - the more sites that link to your site - the more votes - the more impressed are the search engines - and better ranking for your site.

Sometimes this may not necessarily be true. You will find many sites listed above the ones having a lower link popularity. Why does this happen?

Quality wins over quantity. Lets suppose your site is about the same old concept - "Internet Business".

- What about 100 sites that have nothing to do with "Internet Business" link to your site.
- What about 75 sites that have something to do with "Business" link to your site.
- What about 50 sites that have something to do with "Internet Business" link to your site.

The search engines will value more the 50 "Internet Business" sites linking to your site and not the 100 "non relevant" site links to your site. It means links from site having the same nature of business of your site matters.

A big question is how to get links from the sites that have the same concept or business. Making matters more difficult - "same concept" mean "competitor" sites. You must be thinking, how on Earth am I going to get links form my competitors? True, but aren't they thinking the same?

Let's try to increase the link popularity of your site. Open a popular search engine (not a pay per click one they won't help). Type your most important keyword and search. Within seconds all your competitors will show up on your computer screen.

Open them one by one. Also make a note of the sites you are visiting so that you don't repeat visiting. There are many webmasters who are happy exchanging links. Look for this link. Most of the webmasters name it "Link Exchange" or "Swap Links" or even "Links". Search for this text. If a site has a lot of content press Ctrl+F, type "Link" and search. Make a not of the website offering this program. Visit their contact us page and note their contact email address. Type another important keyword and search. Now another set of competitors are glaring at you. You know what to do next.

Repeat this until you are ready with at least 70-80 quality sites offering link exchange program. Since this is open and official, you will face some level of difficulty in exchanging link with them.

The process can be automated using a software. It will save you time and effort. One software we recommend is ARELIES! It has a great feature called "Find Competitor Links" that allows you to quickly find all web sites that link to your competitors. Web sites that link to your competitors are sites that should link to you. ARELIS quickly locates these sites and helps you to convince them to link to your site. It takes help of major search engines and therefore you get the list of the best companies with whom you can exchange links.

Once you are ready with a list of your very important link partners with the help of ARELIS do the following:

Write a nice little professional letter to their webmasters. In short write about your business and say you will be more than happy to link to their website if they do the same. Mail them electronically. I am sure you will be surprised with the results.

Remember to never link your competitors from your index or home page. Always link to them from a sub-page. Reason? Your home page is page that is visited most and hence should be straight away selling products and not linking to your competitors. Link can be of two types - either banner or text links. Imagine how your index page will look like if you keep a lot of banner and text links that too of your competitors. A clumsy looking home page could confuse your visitor, which might distract her from buying your products. And who knows she may end up buying your competitor's product. A customer is interested to know only two things about a product - Price and Quality. If these two satisfies her she buys your product. She has no time to search your site and buy your product. Do not accept any link exchange program where they are insisting to keep the link in the index page. This way your index page will look neat and still you link to your competitors.

Link popularity can be improved in some other ways too. You can start an affiliate program. An affiliate program is a program where someone else promotes your product and in return gets a percentage of the selling price of products sold exclusively by them. This being a win-win situation since you are paying only if your affiliates sell your product, it's highly recommended. Not only do you improve your link popularity but also sell your products. Note that since your affiliate's concept is same as yours, getting a link from them can prove very productive as far as link popularity and search engine ranking is concerned. More affiliates - better link popularity - better ranking - better sales - better business - resulting in some more affiliates joining your program. Once this forms a chain, there is no looking back. At this stage all your affiliates will do the job for you. At this stage you can think of expanding your business.

Another effective way to improve link popularity is submitting your site to important directories like Yahoo and Open Directory. If you want to know about submitting your site to major search engine directory click here.

Since Yahoo is a very popular directory, getting your site listed in Yahoo will definitely increase link popularity of your website. Even Open directory is importance because Google gives a lot of importance to the sites listed in Open Directory. Google take results from Open Directory.

There are a lot of small business directories (Local and International) on the Internet. Submitting your site to these directories will also help to improve link popularity. You can get these directories here:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/World_Wide_Web/
Searching_the_Web/Web_Directories/

How to check the link popularity of your Website? Open Google.com and type the following in the search box:

Link:http://www.yoursite.com

For example if the URL of your Website is http://www.yoursite.com, to know the link popularity of your site type:

Link:http://www.yoursite.com or,
Link:www.yoursite.com

Do not type Link:yoursite.com you may get erroneous results.

This will give you a list of all the links that link to your Web site. It will also include links coming from your site too. In case you want to know the total number of links pointing to your site, except the links coming from your own site then type the following:

link:http://www.yoursite.com -host:http://www.yoursite.com

Now you will get a list and total number of all the links that link your Web site minus the links of your site. Please note that the process to find out link popularity in any other search engine remains the same.

An important advice. Once a webmaster approves your proposal of link exchange, do submit the URL of his site's page that contains the link pointing to your site to all the major search engines. If you want to know the submission process to major search engines please click here.

We are highly experienced in SEO/SEM/Pay Per Click Management. Please contact us regarding any query you may have.

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