Increase Link Popularity to Improve Search Engine Rankings

All major search engines now consider the "link popularity" factor when ranking a website.

Every link from one website to another is treated as a "vote", though search engines weight some sites as having more "votes" or influence than others.

• For example, a link to your site from The Wall Street Journal is considered significantly more important than a link from your cousin's personal homepage.

The Importance of Link Popularity

Link popularity is the #1 ranking criteria for Google followed by "link relevance" – the analysis of the content of the links to your site. To achieve high rankings, companies need to do the best possible job of writing their text content, using search terms, and creating pages that other sites will want to link to.

• Test your link popularity — type this phrase (example shown is for MSN) replacing "yourdomain" with your company's domain name
  

• Test competitor sites – see who's linking to them.
  
  
• Request links back from your partners.
  
  
• Submit white papers to industry web sites.