Link Popularity

What is Link Popularity?

Link popularity and link quality are very important because every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms. If you don't have links, you won't rank well for competitive keywords.

Link popularity consists of:

Number of links
Quality of links
Number of times people click on links to your site
How long end users visit your site
How often people return to your site

In other words, do your site visitors:

Continue navigating your site?
Link to your site?
Bookmark your site?
Return to your site?

Factors That Affect Popularity

Substantial and unique content
How other sites are linked to your site (anchor text)
Site usability

Link Development Tactics

Choose quality over quantity. Link quality carries more weight than quantity. Spend time getting the highest quality links pointing to your site.
Begin with Web directories. Yahoo Directory and DMOZ are two reliable places for high-quality links.
Harness online publicity. How-to tips, helpful articles, even press releases often attract links from other websites. The search engine optimization world calls this "link bait ."
Use blogs and forums wisely. Blogs and forums can call attention to useful information on your site.
Use search engines to research link development. Look at competitors' sites to determine their link development strategy. It can help you with your own. What newspapers and media outlets do they use for online publicity? What Web directories link to their sites? No link popularity checker ("link: domain.com" in Google, "linkdomain: domain.com" in Yahoo) can substitute for doing the research yourself.

Getting Listed

There are basically three ways to get your site listed in a search engine:

Submit your site directly to the search engine using a free submit form.
Let the search engine find your site through links to your site from other sites such as directories. Submit to these directories.
Pay the search engine to index your site.

Submitting to Directories

To get started, be sure to get your site listed in the following directories that are crawled by the search engines:

When you are submitting to directories, be sure to take the time to find the best category for your site and read the submission guidelines provided by each directory. By following their guidelines, you will improve your chances of being listed and decrease the amount of time it takes to get listed.

There are many more directories where you can submit your site. Don't forget to find local or thematic directories that are relevant to the topic of your site. You will be able to find many in our list of search engines and directories.

It will take time for the search engines to index your site after it has been listed in the major directories. So, be patient and expect to wait at least a couple more months before your site starts appearing in the index of the major search engines.

Resources

Page Updated or Reviewed: March 8, 2007