Link popularity is one of the most influential factors for determining how well a website will perform in search engine rankings.

In the past a Web page’s ranking was determined mainly by the number of keyword occurrences within “on-the-page” elements like page text, META tags, title tag etc. Web developers soon learnt that they could trick a search engine and make it return their Web pages on search engine results by stuffing their pages with keywords. The search engines had to find a way to take control over the spammers. So they started to give more and more weight to the elements out of direct control of a Web page creator i.e. “off-the-page” factors. Search engines made the assumption that the greater the number of links from other sites pointing to a website, the more popular the website and therefore the higher quality resource.
In response, website owners figured out many ways to get links pointing to their sites. One method was via link farms. Link farms are pages that contain nothing more than a collection of links. So the search engines gradually shifted away from estimating the link quantity and started to assign a quality factor to each of the links pointing to a website. Now websites that have a higher number of high quality links are looked upon favorably by the search engines.

Link quality consists of the following factors:

• PageRank of the site providing the inbound link
• Relevance of the content of the linking site to the content of your site
• Relevance of words used in the anchor text of the links to the content of your page that the link points to
• Number of other links on the linking page. The lower this number, the more valuable the link

Links pointing to your site from a low ranking, low traffic and unrelated website are nearly worthless.
This lesson deals with four main types of links: inbound links, outbound links, reciprocal links (alternatively called “backlinks” for our purposes, although in some sources these two terms denote different concepts) and, finally, one-way links.Inbound links are links that originate from an external website (domain). Outbound links are links from your pages pointing to a page on an external domain. Reciprocal links are when both your page and a page on other site link to each other. IMPORTANT: links are considered reciprocal if they bind pages, not sites.

Methods and techniques of building a link popularity

You should now understand that the best way to build link popularity is by finding sources of inbound, one-way high quality links. This can be achieved in a number of different acceptable ways.

Google Catalogs

One way to search for forward-looking links is to visit Google Catalogs. There you can find sites in the category you are interested in, visit them and then – if its page rank suits you, and it is not your direct rival you can try to get a link from them to your site. But keep in mind that it is rather difficult (or expensive) to get a link from a site with a high page rank. On the other hand a link from a site with a low page rank won’t be of a great benefit to you either. Therefore, the best way is a balance between a high page rank and real possibilities of getting a link from the other site.

Key Query

The technique is very simple: enter your keyword or key phrase and search for them on a search engine. It will return a high-quality relevant result page. The only drawback of the method is that it is very slow. You have to surf every site in order to see if it suits your purposes or not, and of course, then finding a way to contact the webmaster. With Catalogs one automatically avoids sites with a low page rank.

“Keyword” + “add Url”

This kind of query allows you to find sites that offer a submission option. This method is less qualitative but very productive. The search engine will return a result page with the number of sites where you can submit your own website and thus get an inbound one-way link. It is real luck to get a link from a thematic site or (what is even more important) from a thematic directory. Such a link is considered highly relevant and will positively influence your own page rank and traffic.

Directories

Directories are categorized listings of links from around the Web. There are a great variety of directories on the Web, and though only a few main directories can directly influence your inclusion and ranking in search engines, almost any directory is positive for increasing your link popularity. Directories provide a great source of quality inbound, one-way links because you do not need to link back to a directory once included in its index, and many directories are considered expert sites “casting a vote” for your site. Be careful not to confuse directories with Free-For-All link pages that are of little value. Free-For-All pages usually never decline a submission, although they say that it is only possible to be included. Getting listed in valuable human-edited directories will take more time. If the directory has a paid inclusion option, this process may be expedited. Getting listed in quality directories such as DMOZ or Yahoo can be more beneficial for your link popularity than a lot of links from smaller, newer directories.

Site content and emailing with website owners

The traditional and the most powerful way to get inbound, one-way links is to have attractive site content that other websites will want to link to. Unfortunately, you have no control over how soon and how many other webmasters will find your resource and link to it. You can always send emails to webmasters of similar sites with a simple invitation to visit your website. Of course, webmasters have no obligation to review your site or provide an inbound link, nor are you obligated to link back to their site, even if they do provide a link.

This method allows you to get links from sites other than directories, which can definitely be better. It is very important to remember that most of the top ranked sites got there because of the valuable content within, thus persuading a large number of other resources to link to them. Writing interesting and informative articles for your website is a good way of getting these kinds of links.

A strategy for finding potential link partners is to look at who is linking back to your competitors. If these links are from independent Web resources, they can probably post a link to you as well. You can look for pages linking to a certain domain by entering queries using a special syntax in the search boxes of the search engines. For instance, a Google query would look like:

link:www.yourcompetitor.com

This query will list all the sites found in Google’s index that link to www.yourcompetitor.com.
Web CEO has a nice tool called Partner Finder which can be used for link partner search. It also offers an easy and handy e-mail preferences tab and other services to manage correspondence with potential partners.

Remember that no one is obliged to link to you and the only thing you should say in your message is the suggestion that they consider the possibility of linking to your site as a valuable resource for their visitors.

To evaluate each potential link partner, you can use the Google toolbar in combination with the Alexa toolbar. Visit a potential link partner’s site with these two toolbars installed and look at the figures they display. The Google toolbar provides information about the PageRank of the site (although you shouldn’t entirely base your decision on this) and the Alexa toolbar will tell you what kind of traffic the potential link partner has. Alexa traffic rank is a reverse indication: the closer to 1 the Alexa Rank is, the more traffic this site receives. However, the graphical presentation works the same way as the Google toolbar: the longer the blue strip, the more traffic. There’s not much sense in getting a link from a low traffic website, especially if it has PageRank lower than 3. By finding out the page rank you will know how much value Google puts into that link.