Increase Link Popularity With Clear Strategy, Focused Tactics

Hi,
Success on the Internet can be like a major military campaign. Without a clear strategy and rapid-responsive tactics, your adversaries will mow you down in the search engine rankings. So set out to increase link popularity.

You can start by checking your link popularity score through several search engines, but don't be dismayed when you get different results. That's because each search engine uses its own algorithm (a process of step-by-step computations) to determine its rankings. In each instance, however, two measurements figure into link popularity: the number of links to your web site, and the importance of the sites that link to yours.

In most cases, however, your link popularity rating is made up of two measures: a mathematical evaluation of the importance of the sites linking to you, and the number of sites that link to yours.

Link importance ranks what kind of external websites link to yours. Link popularity counts up how many sites link to yours. These factors go into the algorithm that creates a link popularity score that's weighted, rather than a raw count. This weighted ranking came about after search engine designers realized that spammers were skewing the ratings by setting up phony websites to link up with. These days reputable search engines rarely count links that come from free web sites.

Link importance comes in for criticism from time to time, based on the fact that even though it's computed mathematically, at some point a human makes a subjective judgment as to which sites are "important." You may have 2, 500 devoted fans who think your film criticism site rocks their world, but unless one of their links is from Entertainment Weekly, you're not going to increase link popularity.

So if your strategy is to increase link popularity to a certain level, then your tactics have to be to get noticed by other sites with online clout AND to get more links in total. Some ways to do this include:

1. Content is still King of the Internet, so put high quality content on your site. People will link eagerly if you've got the stuff they want. Use Search Engine Optimization by including keywords in your content so that people will find you easily.

2. Remember the number-one rule of the Internet: Content is King. Without quality content, your site isn't worth the seven seconds it takes to load. Users certainly won't link to a dud site, so work hard on bright content. And don't forget the mighty keywords!