SeOpt.com: SEO Articles: Building Link Popularity
XML FeedArticle Introduction
Search engines determine how important your website is based partially on your link popularity. They figure that if you are in important site--such as abc.com, ebay.com or amazon.com--many other websites will naturally link to yours.
Link popularity is based on the theory that each site that links to your site believes that your site contains valuable content. Therefore, sites with more backlinks must be--according to search engines--better websites.
To some degree they are correct. Unfortunately, the policy of giving importance to links has lead to a scourge of link scams, link farms, and link-scheme spammers.
Ever get frustrated because you typed something in and the first ten results were useless lists of links? You wanted content, but you got link farms instead.
The quest to increase ones link popularity has caused some websites to go overboard. These sites send out mass emails hoping to randomly exchange links with just about anybody. Worse, they exchange links with link farms--sites created specifically to link to other sites with no content of their own. This is a bad thing. Link farms are not only considered spam by search engines, but they hinder those looking for good information.
Definition of Link Popularity
A measure of how popular your website is based on the number of links to your site and the quality of these links.
Definition of Backlinks
The number of websites that link to your site is the number of backlinks your website has.
Nevertheless, relevant backlinks do matter--especially if you want to get into highly competitive categories. For the search term "news" for example, almost every website in the top ten has 50,000 backlinks or more! On the other hand, for niche categories, you can usually do well with just one or two relevant quality backlinks.
Building Link Popularity: It's Not Just About Quantity
It's good to have a large quantity of backlinks. However they should be quality relevant links. High-quality links will boost your link popularity to a greater degree than low-quality links.
So, what makes a quality link? Most importantly, your own judgment. If you believe that the website linking to yours has good content, is relevant and will bring targeted traffic to your website, then it is a good link.
More technically, a quality inbound link has the following features:
1. A quality link is relevant to your website.
2. A quality link is a text link that utilizes your keywords in the anchor text.
It also doesn't hurt SEO to get a site with a good PageRank.
That being said, there really is no such thing as a bad inbound link. There are, however, such things as bad outbound links. That is, there are plenty of people that you should not link to or exchange links with.
Google and other search engines may penalize you for linking to spammers. So, don't ever link to a link farm. It could get you in trouble.
The Right Way to Generate Link Popularity
There is a reason that we have placed this page on link popularity toward the bottom of our search engine guide. Too many people put way too much importance on this one SEO factor and go to extremes to gain hundreds of backlinks. Yes, links matter--but no, they are not the final answer to all your SEO problems.
The right way to go about link building is the way search engines intended link popularity to be generated: Create great content and people will naturally link to you.
Offer sticky tools, free white-papers, awesome articles, forums, a unique product, helpful downloadable programs or anything else that people would naturally recommend to their friends and you will never have to worry about requesting a link.
Now wasn't that easy?
If you truly can't wait to get some backlinks, it's OK to request a few link exchanges with relevant quality sites. But, in the end, we recommend spending your valuable time on bettering your content rather than requesting hundreds of link exchanges.
The Other Right Way to Generate Link Popularity
There is another right way to generate link popularity: submit to directories. Directories, unlike search engines, are human-edited and can provide valuable static text links that will increase your websites link popularity.
The two most important directories are Yahoo and DMOZ. Yahoo is a bit expensive, but is usually worth it. DMOZ is free, but it can take several months for your website to be accepted. It also doesn't hurt to submit to a few smaller directories. In all cases, make sure to read the directory submission guidelines. Most directories will not accept your submission if you did not bother to read and follow their guidelines.
About the Author
Sean Odom runs a Houston Search Engine Optimization firm specializing in search
engine marketing and Social Media Optimization.