How link popularity can help search engine rankings

A high percentage of #1 ranked Web pages on Google don’t contain the queried search term in the body text or in the META tags. How can that be? The answer is: These top ranked Web pages have high link popularity and a good PageRank(TM).

Here I’ll tell you how to obtain high link popularity and a good PageRank so that your Web pages get a high ranking on Google and other popular search engines.

Link Popularity is becoming the determining factor for successful Web sites.

Part 1: What exactly is link popularity?

Link popularity refers to the total number of links that a search engine has found for your Web page. The more Web sites link to your Web page, the higher the link popularity of your page. High link popularity contributes to a high search engine ranking.

Note that link popularity is measured only for single Web pages, not for the whole Web site. Your Web site can have several Web pages with different PageRank numbers.

The idea behind the link popularity concept is simple. The more other Web sites link to your Web site, the more important your site must be. Other sites wouldn’t link to your site if there wasn’t something interesting on your site or if your Web site didn’t contain any special content.

It’s nearly impossible to manipulate link popularity. Previous ranking algorithms that took META keywords or similar factors into account have been quickly abused to mislead the search engines. On the other side, it’s very difficult to manipulate the number of links that point to a site.

That’s why link popularity is now one of the most important factors for search engines when they rank a Web page.

However, you cannot get high link popularity by submitting your Web site to thousands of FFA (free for all) link pages. Not all links are considered equal by the search engines. It does matter who links to you and how they link to you.

You can find more information on this important fact in the next issue of our newsletter.

Recommended link popularity tools:

• Link Popularity Check (freeware):
  Checks and compares your link popularity.
• ARELIS (commercial)
  Helps you to improve the link popularity of your Web pages.

 

 

As mentioned in the last issue of our newsletter, the more Web sites link to your Web site, the higher your link popularity.

However, not all links are equal. Some links count more than others. Links from important Web sites have a greater effect on your link popularity and your search engine rankings.

A link from www.Yahoo.com to your Web site has more weight than a link from a small private Web page. A link from a Web site with high link popularity is better than a link from an unknown Web site.

It’s also important that the Web site that’s linking to you has a similar topic as your Web site. Imagine that you sell shoes on your Web site. A link from another Web site that is all about shoes will count much more than a link from a Web site that links to all kind of Web sites.

Finally, it’s important how the link to your site looks like. For example, one of your important keywords might be “brown leather shoes”.

The link

<a href=”http://www.domain.com”>Brown leather shoes</a>

leads to much better search engine rankings for the keyword “brown leather shoes” than the following link

<a href=”http://www.domain.com”>Smith and Partners</a>

By the way, many people think that they can increase their link popularity by submitting their Web site address to FFA (free for all) link pages and link farms (Web sites that link to all kind of Web sites). This doesn’t work.

More and more search engines recognize FFA pages and link farms and choose to ignore these pages. Usually, submissions to FFA pages are a waste of time that only results in many spam email messages.

In addition, you should avoid services that promise you 2000 links to your site within a week or so. If they link to you at all, these 2000 links must be of poor quality or they don’t have a similar topic as your Web site.

Use common sense. Offers that sound too good to be true probably aren’t true.

Summary:

• try to get links from important Web sites
• try to get link texts that contain your important keywords
• don’t use FFA or link farm pages
• don’t use services that promise lots of links within days
• focus on quality links, not on quantity

Part 3: How to find good potential link partners

As explained in the last issues of our newsletter, it’s important _who_ links to your site. Web sites that have a similar topic as your site are more important than Web sites with different topics.

In addition, if you can convince Web sites with a similar topic to link to your site, you’ll also get targeted traffic from these sites.

People who visit your topic partner sites are usually interested in what you have to offer. They are more likely to come to your site and to buy something. It’s the quality of the traffic that counts, not the quantity.

But how do you find good potential links partners? There are several ways:

1.   

They have a good listing on search engines under your important keywords. This means that they get a good amount of traffic from people who are interested in what you have to offer.

 

 

2.   

 

 

Unfortunately, both ways are very time-consuming and it’s hard to do it for many sites.

Instead of manually searching for good potential link partners, you could also use a software tool like ARELIS to save time .

ARELIS is a commercial tool that quickly finds sites that link to your competitors as well as other potential link partners. It presents the found sites in a clearly arranged list that can be sorted by different criteria. It even helps you to build link pages and to check for broken links.

You can download a demo version here .

In the next issue we’ll explain how to contact potential link partners so that you’ll get a positive reply.

In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool “ Link Popularity Check “. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.

Part 4: How to contact potential link partners

In part 3, we told you how to find good potential link partners. When you’ve found such high quality sites, it’s important that you use the right words to contact the webmasters of these sites.

If you want them to link to your Web site, you have to be personal and politely. Emails like the following usually do NOT work:

I’ve found your site and I think we could link to each
other. That will increase your search engine ranking and
mine, too.

Best,

 

 

Many webmasters consider sending such messages as spamming. It’s much more effective to use personalized email messages. They’ll improve the chances of your link request message being read and acted upon favorably.

If you want positive feedback, you must convince the webmaster that you’ve really visited the Web site and that you know what the site is about.

Try to convince them that your Web site is related to their site and make it easy for potential link partners to link back to your site.

Here’s an example:

I found your CheckYourLinkPopularity.com site recently and
like it very much. I think the straight-to-the-point web
site design is perfect for the freeware tool you’re
offering.

I’ve placed a link to your site at
http://www.Axandra.com/recommended-sites

I’ve noticed that you link to other Web sites that are
related to your freeware tool. We offer a Web site promotion
tool that also focuses on link popularity
(http://www.Axandra.com/arelis/index.htm).

It’d be great if you also placed a link to our Web site. If
you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me
by email or phone at 123-456-7890.

Best regards,

Johannes Selbach, CEO
http://www.Axandra.com

 

 

As you can see, we’ve already linked to the other site before asking them for a reciprocal link. If you’ve already linked to a site, the webmaster is much more likely to answer your request.

This sounds like a very time consuming task. Fortunately, there are tools that help you with that. If you use ARELIS, a software program to manage reciprocal links, you can quickly visit and contact potential link partners.

ARELIS lets you preview a Web site and offers a built-in email client that helps you to contact potential link partners quickly and easily. You can use email templates that use variables so that you can create email messages
very quickly. For example, ARELIS can automatically insert the name and the URL of potential link partners as well as many other variables.

However, ARELIS is not a spamming tool because it only lists relevant Web sites and you must visit every Web site before contacting it. Just how a serious webmaster would do it and what brings the best results.

In addition, ARELIS automatically creates and manages your link pages for you so that you can quickly add, edit and remove link partners from your Web pages.

You can download a free demo version here:
http://www.Axandra.com/arelis/download.htm

Next week, we’ll discuss what you can do to increase the success of your linking campaign.

In addition to ARELIS, we recommend the free link popularity tool “ Link Popularity Check“. It checks and compares your link popularity on different search engines.

Part 5: How to increase the success of your campaign

Until now, you’ve learned how to locate good potential link partners. In addition, you know which Web sites and services you should avoid if you want to obtain a good and long lasting link popularity.

You’ve also learned how to contact potential link partner sites and that a personal approach gets much better results than mass emailing sites.

Here are a few other important tips to increase the success of your linking campaign:

1.    Link to potential link partners first before you ask them to link to you.

With ARELIS, you can quickly add new link partners to your site and you can also quickly remove them if they don’t want to link back to your site. Building link pages in the design of your Web site requires only a single mouse click in ARELIS.

 

 

2.    Offer a “Link to us” page on your Web site.

On this Web page, there are three ready made HTML snippets at the end of the page that link partners can insert on their own link pages.

 

 

3.    Make your link pages easy to find.

 

 

Top 10 ways to link popularity

Link popularity has become an important factor in the ranking algorithms of most search engines. If many quality Web sites link to your site, you’ll have a good position in the search engines.

There are a number of ways to improve the link popularity of your Web site. Here’s the first half of our top 10 list on how to improve your link popularity:

1.    Cross-link your sites

An easy way to improve your link popularity is to add a link from your own popular Web site to a less popular site of your own.

2.    Give testimonials

Everyone has some favorite software tools and utilities. Contact the publishers or developers and explain why you like their software programs. Some of them will request a permission to display your testimonial on their Web site, along with a link to your site.

You can also contact Web sites that don’t offer software programs but interesting articles. Just make sure that you really stand behind what you say as it can backfire to you if you recommend bad products.

3.    Awards for you and other sites

You can submit your Web site to sites who offer awards. If they reward you their award, then they’ll probably link to your site. Just search Google for “awards directory your-keyword” (replace “your-keyword” with a keyword that is important to your business).

You can also offer an award for other Web sites. Submit your awards page to the above-mentioned awards directories to make it popular. The Web sites who receive your award will link back to your site.

4.    Participate in newsgroups and discussion forums

When you post to newsgroups and discussion forums, add a signature file with a link to your Web site.

An easy way to post messages in newsgroups is to create a Google account and to post via their Web interface: http://groups.google.com

To find good discussion forums, just search Google for “forums directory your-keyword”. For example, if you want to participate in a marketing forum, search Google for “forums directory marketing”.

5.    Provide a link directory

Offer a link directory on your Web site which links to quality Web sites with a similar topic. Your visitors will appreciate such a resource and you’ll provide incentive for other sites to link to your site.

You can add a “link to us” page to your Web site on which you promise to add other complementary sites to your link directory if they link back to you first.

ARELIS, the professional reciprocal links management software, can help you to create and maintain a link directory (among many other useful things). It also checks if other Web sites remove their link to you.

6.    List your Web site with Yahoo

If you have a business Web site, you might want to pay US$299 yearly to Yahoo to have your Web site listed: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/busexpress.html

If you have a non-business site, you can submit to Yahoo without paying: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7.    List your Web site with Open Directory Project (ODP)

If your Web site is listed in the popular directory ODP, then your Web site will have a good base for the link popularity.

Rumor has it that Google starts crawling Web sites with the Web sites listed in the ODP directory. Best of all, you can add your Web site to ODP without paying a fee.

8.    List your Web site in regional and industry-specific directories.

We’ve already covered this topic in depth

9.    Write articles for your audience

Write articles about the topics that your Web site visitors are interested in. After a while, other Web sites will link back to your articles.

You can also send your articles to syndicate Web sites. They’ll offer your articles to other Web sites. Just make sure that your article contains a link to your Web site so that other sites who publish your article will automatically link to you.

Here’s a list of some syndicate sites .

10.  Get reciprocal links from complementary sites

Search the major search engines for your keywords. They will return many Web sites that don’t compete with your site, or which offer complementary things.

Visit their site and then write them an email message to request a link to your site. If you link back to them first, they’ll be more likely to link to you.