Link Popularity

Link popularity measures the quantity and quality of the inbound links that point to your website. It's not enough to have a lot of websites linking to you; they must also be considered important websites. In other words, websites that have inbound links from important websites are also considered important. The graphic in figure 5.1.3.d illustrates this point:

Figure 5.1.3.d Link Popularity Example

Figure 5.1.3.d Link Popularity Example

In this illustration the important websites are marked with green checks. Website B has inbound links from other important websites, which makes website B important too. Website A does not have any important inbound links, which makes it less important than website B. All things being equal, website B would perform better in the search engines than website A.

There is no definitive way to know if a particular website is considered important by the search engines. However, the search engines do drop a few clues. Here are the two methods that I use to judge a website's importance:

1. Google PageRank™ - The Google toolbar will display a ranking between 0 and 10 for each web page that you visit. Web pages with a PageRank (PR) of 10 are considered the most important, while websites with a PageRank of 0 are least important. Some SEO's discount the value of Google's PageRank, but I find this data useful when I'm evaluating a website.

2. Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's) - If a web page is ranked high in the search engines for a particular keyword, the search engine must think it's relevant or important for that keyword.

Now that you understand more about linking basics we can move on to strategies for building inbound links to your website.

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