How To Improve Your Link Popularity
This article will show you the importance of link popularity and how to improve your webpage's link popularity utilizing a few different techniques. Link popularity simply is the number of links that point to a webpage and is a crucial factor used by almost all of the search engines to rank websites.

Link Popularity Importance
With the every increasingly popularity of Google, web site owners marketing efforts have had to change to accommodate what Google is looking for in a quality site. One way to prove that you have a quality site has been with link popularity. Good quality incoming links coupled with good quality page content will bring highly targeted traffic, and a lot of it. Just keep in mind that quality is key. The saying less is more really applies here. Just because your website has five hundred incoming links doesn't mean that they are all relevant. Ensure that the links you are getting are relevant to the content that your page is offering. This is extremely important.

Tips to Improving link Popularity
1. Directory Listings: Ensure your site is listed in the Open Directory Project (ODP) and also in Yahoo's Business Express ($299 yearly) and LookSmart Express Submit or Basic Submit. Directory listings boost popularity because they rely on human editors, known to only select relevant websites. You may also try searching for other directories to submit to. Do a search for "list of directories".

2. Cross Linking: Or you may hear it referred to as internal linking. Make sure you cross link your important related pages. This technique tells the search engines that these are the more important pages within your website therefore they will increase in ranking. Cross linking your pages also helps the search engines find and index your most important pages quicker, especially if you have hundreds of pages and some of them are four and five levels deep. Internal linking is a great way to increase the amount of keywords in your visual text links. You will notice that we have linked to our list of directories and search engines. This is an example of internal linking. We've essentially told the search engines that these are pretty important pages of this site.

3. Publish articles: Write up some informative articles your audience is interested in, then submit these articles to online publications in your industry. Provide a brief bio which includes your web sites URL and make a condition that the article must be published intact with your bio. Over a short period of time you should gather some quality links.

4. Request Links: Open up an Excel spreadsheet and list all of the possible linking partners that you have gathered. Now that you have a list of possible link partners put a link on your site to their site and then email each site owner telling them that you've linked to them and respectfully ask them to link back to you in return. You would be surprised by the amount of response you get. Make it as easy as possible for the other site to link to you. I've found a that actually providing a form so the site owner can just copy and paste your link code into their site makes linking to you extremely easy. This can save a lot email-tag for the both of you.

Improve Website Link Popularity
Link popularity simply refers to how the major search engines (like Google and Yahoo!) measure your website link popularity based on the number and quality of in-bound links (or votes) coming to your site (your “website link popularity”).

For instance, on most search engines, if you type the following – link: – followed by your website address, you will be able to tell the total number of website pages that are in-bound links; that link to your website (as recognized by that particular search engine).

Google, for instance, uses website link popularity as a means for improving the quality and relevancy of its 'organic' search engine results. Unlike most search engines, Google will filter out any in-bound links that it deems to be of low quality or unimportant so the number of recognized in-bound links (or votes) to your website may vary between the search engines.

The most important point to make here is this; when you improve link popularity by adding better quality in-bound links (for instance web pages with higher page rank) the greater your “website link popularity” will be with the search engines and the higher your website pages will be ranked in the search engine listing results.

Why Is It Important to Improve Link Popularity?
In the eyes of the search engines the higher the quality of links that are in-bound to your web pages, the higher they tend to rate your website link popularity and your page ranking, which in turn increases your online visibility.

In-bound links from web pages with a page rank of 5 or greater are considered to be excellent, whereas in-bound links from web pages with a page rank less than 2 are not as highly regarded.

Quality of link - Link popularity will skyrocket when popular sites link you such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (ODP). These sites are considered authoritive sites and receive a high amount of traffic. Also, you should concentrate on getting links from major search engines such as Google, MSN, and also sites that relate to your sites theme/content