Link Popularity Enhancement: Define your website's popularity

Link Popularity is an important factor in determining the placement of your website among their search results. Better the link popularity, more the chances of the visibility of your website in the search engines.

Link popularity depends largely on the quality and the quantity of links on external websites that link to your website. The aim is to gain external links from websites that contain similar subject matter, themes and keywords to those of your website. Achieving strong link popularity is a vital factor in distinguishing your website against the thousands of other credible sites related to a potential visitor's search query.

How Goorank can benefit you
Years of research and analysis have gone into finding out the apt methods to increase link popularity.

Goorank's link popularity enhancement process involves four steps:

• An initial standard report confirming all indexed sites that link to your website
• A customized plan to increase the quantity and quality of links pointing to your website
• Continuous measurement and validation of the quality and value of each indexed link
• Constant attention to link popularity factors within the search landscape

Improve Link Popularity
As we have seen, link popularity forms a major factor that affects the visibility of your website. Google began the concept of ranking sites based on their link popularity with the fact in mind that the most deserving sites will naturally have the most quality links to them. In other words, other sites have to validate a certain site by linking to it to make it rank high on the search engine.

Improving a site's link popularity is a very important part of a search engine marketing campaign and often an activity that needs to be proactively managed. To improve link popularity, one can adopt various methods like advertising, sponsorships and public relations to help the site get more exposure. This will enhance the links that you can get for your website.

We at Goorank, more or less follow the steps mentioned below to help our clients depending on their requirements.

I. Link Potential Identification
The first and the foremost steps are to identify potential link opportunities. This process requires a manual check of the links of the competitive sites. We enter your key search phrases; click on the top ranking sites, and then review who is linking to them and why. This gives us a fairly good idea of where the best link opportunities lie. This information is then presented to our clients.

Let us take a look at the common link opportunities:

• Specialty Directories — Yahoo, ODP, and Looksmart are the major online directories. Apart from these, there are typically directories or buyers guides for every major industry that provide online listings and links.
• Partners — Distributors, sales agents, and key suppliers can be the partners who may link to their site.
• Complementary Sites — These sites are not your direct competitors but they sell products to the same target market as you. Therefore, there is an interest in sharing traffic through a process called reciprocal linking.
• Advertising and Sponsorships — Many sites get link popularity from ads that they run or sites, events, or organizations that they sponsor.
• Online Media — Public Relations can greatly be used for more exposure of the website as well as for link building programs.

II. Link Building

The second step now is to get links which can be purchased, requested or exchanged. If your site is good, useful and informative, every site would want to link to your site. This may make the process of link exchange somewhat easier.

Free Links
Qualified sites with good content can be listed in Special Directories for free as they are looking at means to attract more visitors to their site. Even though the top spots are saved for advertisers, this can be helpful for link building. Also, distributors, agents and suppliers will often link to your site for free as they stand to benefit from your success.

Paid Links
Many sites sell ad space. This space should be bought keeping in mind the quality and quantity of visitors that they will get from your site, the link popularity that will be passed to you and the cost.

Reciprocal Links
Many sites are often willing to exchange links in order to improve their own site's link popularity. This area of search engine optimization must be tackled carefully in order to avoid joining "link exchange programs" that are frowned upon by the search engines. Here it is necessary to create a resource or link page in order to implement a good reciprocal linking program.

f your site is well written and provides a lot of useful information, you won't have to search out links at all. Other sites will link to yours of their own volition. Creativity plays a major role when it comes to the link popularity of your site. How can you make your site so good that others will be only too willing to link to it, without you even having to ask for it? If you can figure that out, you won't have to worry too much about link popularity.