Promote Your Website: Link Popularity

What is link popularity?

The quantity of links in different websites pointing to your sites is called link popularity of your website. The more popular is your site the more links you get from other websites and vice versa.

Why is it so important?

Links from high traffic websites furnish you with constant stream of visitors. Other website marketing efforts i.e. email marketing, might give good influx of visitors while the campaign lasts but the quantity diminishes once the campaign is over. Links are a different story! Once a link is installed, it might start bringing a steady flow of visitors all the time, depending on the website where the link was placed.

Link popularity is also crucial to search engine ranking of your website. Search engines, especially Google, claim that link
popularity is one of the key factors that they consider in their search algorithm while indexing a website. What would be the rank of a website in a search result depend on its link popularity in a very big way.

So, how can you conduct an effective link popularity development campaign and build traffic for your website?

Content is the king

Prior to start a link popularity campaign, you should seriously question yourself, what would be the reason for the other sites
to post a link pointing to your website? Most high traffic sites are quite picky about putting links, and would not do it without
any apparent reason.

If your site boasts quality content that the visitors of other sites might find valuable, chances are there that those sites
would be interested in posting a link of your site on their relevant web pages. High quality content that gets updated
regularly will definitely help you getting more links and subsequently more visitors. If even you are just a web store,
you can still add much sought-after content to your site, such as, detail product information, articles related to the specific
products, comparison tables, etc.

If it is really difficult to get relevant content for your website, try getting a valuable tool that might be interesting for visitors
and incorporate it to your website. You must have noticed that free search engine submission forms are common on Search Engine Optimization sites. Giveaways like e-
books, white papers, articles and other freebies are also good for creating interest to a website.

Submit website to various directories

When your new website is up and running, first thing you should do is to submit your site to many search directories such as, Yahoo!, DMOZ etc. available on the Internet. Not only, this will help you get quality backward links to your site, this is also the fastest method for your site to get crawled by search engines spiders and get indexed by them.

Don't underestimate the value of the many regional and industry specific directories. Try submitting your site as many as possible relevant local directories. Examples of these directories are municipal business directory, local chamber of commerce directory etc.

If you are a seller of, for example, metal related products; get your site enlisted in as many metal industry associated directories as you can manage.

Get reciprocal links

Since backward links are so important, building link popularity by exchanging links with other websites should be a priority in
your online marketing effort.

Which are the websites that you should consider to get backward links to your website? Your objective should be - not just having any backward link from any site, the sites
that you are getting reciprocal link has to be relevant to the content of your website as well. First of all, if you get a link from a website which has nothing in common with
your site, you, most probably, will not receive any traffic from that site. The second and most important issue is - the search engines, while calculating your website's rank in
a specific keyword search result, consider, mainly, the backward links which are relevant to your site.