Link Popularity - Improve Your Rankings

 Link  popularity  is a very important part for your search engine rankings.

The  link  popularity  greatly influences the way that search engines rank your website. Google for example has something called a Page rank which they assign to each website and to each individual web page. The page rank in turn affects the position that your website will rank in the search engine results for any particular keyword or key phrase.

 Link  popularity  is normally used as a term that describes the number of  links  as well as the quality of links that lead to your website from quality websites that relevant to your site content wise. Although Google has recently start placing less importance on inbound  links  due to  link  farms and paid  link  networks, inbound  links  are still considered to be of the upmost importance for search engines when ranking a website and its  link  popularity .

The search engines view an inbound link as some form of testimonial which shows that a specific website has some form of quality content worth linking to. In recent times we have seen the strong growth of blogs and blog networks. Due to the strong habit of bloggers to link to one and other, many blogs have been able to reach very good rankings.

The webmasters of e-commerce sites quickly saw the trend and jumped on the band wagon so as to increase their  link  popularity . Unfortunately due the large number of webmasters and marketers having abused blogs by link spamming them, the search engines are now frequently skeptical when it comes to inbound links from blogs.

For those of you that are new to the Page rank system, the easiest way to check the page rank for any website is by downloading the Google toolbar for either Internet Explorer or for Firefox. After installing either one, you will be able to see a small box in your browser which indicates the Google Page rank for any website that you visit.

Step 1 – Finding relevant and highly ranked websites

The best way for raising your  link  popularity  is by getting an inbound  link  from a website which is ranked well and has content that is relevant to your website or that complements it somehow.

I advice all my readers to stay well clear from link exchanges, networks and link farms. History shows us that the search engines find out about this in the end (especially Google) and this can lead to dramatic actions from their side. The punishment can include even deletion of your website from their search engine and will ruin your  link  popularity .

Once your website is banned from one of the major search engines it can be a very long process to get re-included. It does happen frequently that a website is not allowed to be re-included in the search engine which is a nightmare for any website as it seriously reduces the potential traffic volume that a website could attract.

This might be a good time to warn you about shady search engine optimization firms with a bulk of them coming from India. These search engine optimization firms promise top 10 Google and Yahoo rankings and lots of other promises which seem to be good to be true. These firms often use black hat SEO tricks to increase the ranking of their client’s websites.

The problem is that they will not give you the top 10 ranking most likely and secondly once the search engine finds out, you will be more than likely deleted from the search engine results.

Frequently if you ask these firms about this they will tell you that everything they do is completely legal and that they will do miracles for your  link  popularity .

Those words won’t help you very much though once they have done their damage and managed to get you delisted from the search engines. You won’t hear back from them once that occurs and all your efforts in regards to  link  popularity  will have been a waste of time.

Just work on your  link  popularity  yourself and start slowly. Search for sites which clearly are sites with similar content and high page rank or look for sites that are affiliated with government websites or educational websites as the search engines seem to hold those links in the highest regards.

2) Requesting an inbound link

Obviously the other site their webmaster needs to be made aware of your site so that they can consider linking to your website.

The easiest way to do this and hopefully improve your  link  popularity  is through sending an email to the webmaster or website owner with a request for a  link .

It’s very important to customize each email and for the email not look like a generic email as people really hate that. You will find that the positive reply percentage is much higher this way compared to some standard email which you send out.

We have created a few tips for creating this  link  request email which should lead to higher  link  popularity .

• Try obtaining the email address of the relevant person rather than sending it to info@example.com as your email might end up in the spam or delete box.

• Be careful what you write in the email and the subject title as certain words link exchange might trigger a spam filter or possibly takes away the interest of the recipient to read the email.

• Be straight forward on what you are asking for from the other person and try to list some positive reasons on why the link would be beneficial to both parties.

• Try to include some personalized items in the email which shows that you have read through their website and that you really are interested in dealing with them. This will certainly lead to an increase in  link  popularity  in the long run.

• It’s more than normal that you will be required to give a link back. If you are the one initiating the contact then you should place a link on your site which links to their site first. This will show a sign of trust and will most likely lead to a backlink to your site.

If however they do not reply after some time you should remove the  link  to their site as it will have no benefit to your  link  popularity  efforts.

For the remainder of the tips and advice please visit the authors website where the article continues. The remaining section of the article can be found here:  Link  Popularity  [http://www.explainsall.com/ Link _ Popularity .html]

Source by James Van Eyk

Link Popularity - Improve Your Rankings