Chapter 9: Building Link Popularity
Posted on | March 23, 2005 | No Comments
Building link popularity as a search engine marketing strategy has become more and more important over the years. In fact, many search engine experts believe that a solid link popularity strategy can literally make or break a site.
Why Building Link Popularity is a Difficult Task
Life would be simple if you could just search out zillions of web sites and get them all to link to you. But if you want to use link popularity to move up the search engine rankings, the task is actually much more difficult. That’s because the engines only want high quality, related in-bound and out-bound links. Link farming and huge link exchange program techniques are dead. Why? Because if you use these techniques, a search engine could find and blacklist your site quickly.
Does this mean having to link to your higher ranking competitors? Certainly not. You simply need to link out to, and receive reciprocal links back from, sites that share the same focus as your site.
Information Communities: It’s What a Search Engine Wants
When building your link popularity, you need to start thinking in terms of “Information Communities” because these are what search engine company’s are hoping to build. Why? Think of the problem from the search engine’s perspective. What would help raise search engine customer satisfaction? Answer: relevant listings to the search query. Sure, but take it one step farther. What if the top listed website in any directory also contained links to other important information-rich websites within the same topic area? That would build an Information Community and, with one click from the search engine, the search engine user would find page after page of information relevant to their search query. That’s going to lead to one happy search engine user and thus a happy search engine.
Where Did Search Engine Company’s Pick Up This Link Popularity Technique?
Ever read a scientific paper? If not, go to your local college or university library and take a peek. At the end of any scientific paper you’ll find a list of references that (you guessed it) refers to a whole bunch of other papers on the same topic. This creates an instant Information Community. One paper leads to many so that any interested party can quickly learn more about the topic at hand. This is link popularity at work people. Learn from it. Emulate it. And watch your site rise in the rankings.
Click here to learn more about why Outbound Link Are Only Half of the Story.
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