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Last time we covered how <img alt>, flash sites, title, META tags affect your site search relevancy on search engines. This time, we will discuss probably the most important factor when search engine decides how to rank your websites: Link Popularity.
Definition of link popularity
According to wikipedia.org, the largest online free encyclopedia defines link popularity in the following manner:
Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings.
Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index.
Search engines such as Google use a special link analysis system to rank web pages. Citations from other WWW authors help to define a site’s reputation. The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.
In others words, search engines such as Google treats quality incoming links to your website as “votes”. The more “votes” your website has, the better its Google’s ranking. However before gathering link from other website , there are some issues that you need to consider:
- Define your keywords. This step is the most important step when you begin your website SEO journey. People type in keywords in the search boxes on engines like Google. It’s important to know what are the most searched terms that users querying. This can be done on a process called keyword research. We will discuss this issue in coming weeks.
- After decide which keywords you are targeting, you should whenever possible insert keyword rich anchored text to your internal web pages and ask your readers to link to your website using your keywords.
- when gathering incoming links, ensure 2 websites have similar or relevant topics to take the full advantage of increase your website search engine positioning.
Let’s look an examples website, www.agogdigital.com to see what do we mean by linking with similar websites and have keyword rich anchored text.
Keywords: SEO Hong Kong, Hong Kong search engine optimization.
If I were the webmaster of this website, I will use the following HTML code whenever gather incoming links to this website:
<a href=”http://www.agogdigital.com/” title=”search engine optimization hong kong”> Hong Kong SEO </a> or <a href=”http://www.agogdigital.com/” title=”hong kong seo company”>Search engine optimization services hong kong </a>
The idea is mixed up those keywords little bit. You’ll notice I add an extra “title” tag for the HTML anchored text code and most search engine professionals believes it increases your site search relevancy even further.
See the ideas? Now for point 3 that we discussed above, to look how agogdigital.com do their linking, you can use the “link “command on Yahoo! site explorer. To do that simply type:
link:http://www.agogdigital.com
on the normal Yahoo! search boxes and it will returns something like this:

The screen shot only shows 5 incoming links that agogdigital.com has, but as you scrolled down the page you will find something like dmoz.org, promotionworld.com, www.softwareceo.com, and more. We will talk about how do you link your site with relevant or “authority” websites next week, so if you don’t want to miss this important article, go and subscribe my feed and you will automatically notify you when my blog got this updates!
Thanks for reading! and don’t forget to get my free keyword desktop software!