Link Popularity - Why it Should Be a Main Element For Your SEO Campaign to Be a Success

WHAT DOES LINK POPULARITY MEAN TO YOU?


When a fellow website owner decides to add a link to your site from one of his pages, what he is actually doing is validating the fact that the content in your site is relevant to the content in his site. It is also an acknowledgement from him that his site visitors should also be visiting your site to gather even more information regarding whatever subject matter it is that both of you have designed a website for.

THREE ELEMENTS THAT ALL INCOMING LINKS FROM OTHER SITES SHOULD HAVE


Because you have to make sure that the search engine spiders will rank you higher if they find sites that are as relevant to your main topics as you are, you should always make sure that your incoming links from other sites include these important elements:

1. QUANTITY


Most search engines such as Google and Yahoo! will not even allow a website to be submitted unless it has at least one or two relevant links to it before the submission process can be completed. You have to be sure to have at least ten really good and content heavy sites that share the same topics and subject matter that every page on your site also contains.

Google likes to see a lot of relevant links to your site coming from larger and more established sites before they will even consider giving you a top twenty placement in their page rankings. A good way to get a sizable amount of links set up for your site is by doing an intensive search on Google by entering the keyword phrase that describes your website perfectly. Once you do that, go to the top thirty sites that you find and examine each site thoroughly before you e-mail the webmaster at each individual site to ask them if they would link your site with theirs.

Most websites encourage new site owners to link to them by having a "Link Your Site" page on one of their main category pages. Just go to each site's navigation bar to look for it, and if that fails, go to the "Contact Us" page and kindly request a link to be set up between you and the site that you feel will benefit your web pages by being associated with yours.

2. RELEVANCE OF THE INCOMING LINK


If your website happens to be about the drivers of NASCAR, then you better not link your web pages that deal with that subject with a site that is all about daytime soap opera. For one thing, your site visitors will be none too pleased to be driven to a site that never had any intention of going to, and the search engine will take you down ten pegs as far as your page ranking is concerned because of the irrelevancy of that particular site.

You have to make sure that ALL of your incoming and outgoing links have the highest degree of relevancy to your own web site, or you really will be penalized by Google and Yahoo!, which will result in the ultimate failure of your SEO campaign.

3. A HIGH DEGREE OF QUALITY MUST COME FROM YOUR INCOMING LINKS


One of the ways that Google gauges site quality is by the time frame of when the website was first submitted for approval by Google. For example, if a site was approved by Google in 2001, that site would be looked on as being of higher quality than a site that was approved by Google in 2003. So if you can find ten sites that were formed before the year 2000 and they have a high degree of relevance to your particular site, those are the ones you should pursue to link your site to.

Google is the only search engine that feels that way, however, so you should also examine the other elements that Yahoo! and MSN believe must be contained in your site to distinguish it as being of high quality. The best thing that will distinguish your site as being of good quality is by having relevant and detailed information in all of your text content.

By this, I mean you must have links in your web pages articles to other sites or web pages that will give the web reader a more descriptive analysis of the subject or topic you are discussing in your web content or blog content. You must also have descriptive text images for your photos or pictures on all of your pages as well.

As long as you follow these rules, any website owner will achieve success through great link popularity.