Link Popularity , site popularity

Link Popularity / site popularity

For a search spider to find your website your website needs to be linked to from other websites.Such links are also called in-bound links(or backlinks)-. The number of links coming to your website from other websites as well as the search engine ranking of the websites linking to your website helps to determine how your website will rank in the search engines. Also the links going out of your website, and the ranking of the sites your website links to, will contribute to calculating your website's relevance. Even the links from your website back into your website will contribute to deciding your website's rank.

There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the back link.

build links between your website and others
link with websites that are popular
link with websites that are related
don't put to many outgoing links on a page
concentrate on incoming links to your homepage
avoid redirects and link-thrus for incoming links
don't duplicate your website on multiple domains
don't use an exotic location for your homepage
pay for links to your website from search engines
buy sponsorship or ad links from other websites
list your website in major directories
provide rss feeds
don't require url arguments for content pages
don't try to grow the number of your links to fast

How to increase link popularity?

Getting people to link to your web site is not very easy - it requires a lot of time and effort. Before you approach other web administrators, be sure that your web site is fully functional and that it offers a "Links" or equivalent page. The webmasters you approach for getting in-bound links would obviously like their site links to be placed on your web site. You should then write a small phrase to describe your web site. This phrase will form the "hot spot" for the link. Then write one or two sentences which detail what your site offers. Now approach the various web masters, requesting them to place a link to your web site and providing them the URL, the phrase and the couple of sentences which you wrote.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives.

Image Links

Using images for links might be prettier but it is a SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can't see all the designer miracles, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description in the <alt> tag, as described next.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “bad guys” are also to be avoided.

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.