how to improve your link popularity and increase your web site traffic

Overview: link popularity is a measure of the number and quality of other sites that carry links to yours.

For example: at the time of writing, amazon.com is more popular than bbc.co.uk because it has around 25,600,000 sites linking to it, whereas bbc.co.uk only has around 4,760,000. (Figures from Marketleap).

How it works: link popularity is becoming a major factor in increasing the number of visitors to a web site. It works in two ways:

Firstly, if a popular site sets up a link to your site then you will inevitably get more visitors, because of the amount of traffic that passes through the other site.
Secondly, if popular and important sites link to your site then major search engines, primarily Google, will draw the conclusion that your site must be quite good too and will rank you more highly in search results.

The actual formula for measuring link popularity not only takes into account how many other pages link to your page, but also looks at the quality of those links - this is where it starts to get complicated. The kind of factors affecting quality include how many other links that page carries, whether it includes the same keywords as your page and how many other sites carry links to it. Also links from major directories or portals may rank higher so that getting a listing in Yahoo will improve your link popularity rating in Google.

Articles intro

Web design briefing
How visitors find you
Keywords
Domain names
Content
Home page etiquette
Keep your site legal
Get listed
Search engine optimisation
Link popularity
Meta tag myths
Web page titles
Traffic building
Visitor analysis

How many other web sites already carry links to yours?

Find out by searching at Marketleap. Type in your domain name and Market leap will show you how your site's link popularity compares with a range of other commercial sites. It also gives you links to each of the 6 search engine results that it works from so you can visit them and see exactly who's linking to your site. Why not do the same exercise for some of your competitor's sites?

How can you improve your link popularity?

Unfortunately there is no quick or automatic way to improve link popularity. Be prepared to invest your time in the process (or pay a consultant to do it for you).

Don't even consider link building if your site is still under development - wait until it is running smoothly with plenty of interesting content.

The link building process, put simply, is:

Identify sites for inbound links - sites that attract the same kind of visitors that you are targeting and plenty of them.
Create a link to each of these sites from your own site (some people say you should wait until the other sites have agreed to a link), if necessary set up a 'links' or 'resources' page.
Find a suitable place in each site for a link back to yours.
Get in touch with each site owner personally and make it easy and attractive for them to create the link - explain why your site complements theirs, where the link could go, include your logo, the link code and a link to the page in your site which already has a link to theirs. Even offer them a free product sample or some other incentive.
Follow up after a week or two.
Remember to thank them when your link appears.
From time to time check that their site is still carrying your link.

Improving link popularity is mainly about building relationships with other web site owners. The down side is that, like you, their time is precious and they have many priorities other than creating links to other sites. However, the up side is that, like you, they want to create sites that have engaging content and improve their own link popularity. So there is the potential for a simple trade.

If you have an interesting web site with engaging content then, with a little effort, you will definitely be able to improve link popularity and, therefore, visitor numbers.

Search engines will typically lead more visitors to your site than links from other web sites. However, visitors following links are more likely to be in your target market because of the route they have taken to find your site and they could prove to be more valuable.

20 June 2002 (new links added 12 November 2003)

More info:

A simple step by step outline of a link building campaign plus Link Popularity and its Effect on Search Engine Rankings from rankwrite.com

A free report from LinkingMatters.com to help website owners and publishers plan effective linking strategies - includes guidelines, worksheets and links to over 50 articles on linking.

Identify the most popular sites world wide in your market with 100hot.com

'Winners Don't Take All: Link Popularity for the Rest of Us' and 'Search engine strategies - looking at links' from Search Engine Watch

Traffick article on 'Ten Steps to Building Links to Your Site'

top