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Step 6 - How Popular Are Your Links?
Link popularity is a measure of how many websites
are pointing hyperlinks at another website.
A hyperlink is an HTML tag element that is able to take a user from site-to-site or from page-to-page.
Hyperlinks also serve a very special purpose for the search engines. A hyperlink is made up of two main parts. The target URL and the clickable link text, or anchor text. The anchor text tells the search engines a great deal about the website where the link is pointing to. For now, just remember the anchor text is a very important part of successful link building.
The Web by its very nature is based on hyperlinks where sites link to other sites. Each site linking to another site is in fact casting a vote in favor of the sites they link to. Since search engines can organize and count these links in their vast databases, they are able to determine which sites get more inbound links related to specific search topics.
Every inbound link is considered a citation for a particular website. In turn, every citation is interpreted as a recommendation for a site's quality by the search engines. The more citations the search engines can find, the more trusted a site becomes through the power of links. Most of the major crawler based search engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN employ some type of link analysis as part of their ranking algorithms and can easily discover newly created links on any site pointing somewhere else.
The benefits of link popularity
Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective search engine optimization campaign today. Link popularity is the most important off-page factors to consider improving for all websites. The key concept to understand about link building is, you don't need thousands of links to successfully compete, you just need the links that are the most related to your site with the highest quality possible.
Understanding the Google PageRank
Google PageRank is the measure of a website's external and internal links on a logarithmic scale, also known as PR. The Google PageRank is the foundation for Google's link popularity calculations.
A high Google PageRank increases spider visits by the search engines, which will guarantee freshness of your web pages in the search results and likely more pages indexed as well.
Proper Google PageRank distribution through internal links
Internal linking techniques and outbound links originating from your site can play a big role in how well your site will rank. Internal and external linking can also affect the Google PageRank value of your home page and internal pages.
How can external links lift your sites ranking?
Link popularity can be expressed in rather simple terms of links equal votes. Just like in a democratic election, votes are cast for the favorite candidates. As a webmaster, you want to make sure your website becomes a favorite site to link to by others site within your topic because it has some value to offer. Your ongoing job as a webmaster will be to make a quality site and seek inbound links from as many related sites as you can.
What does this mean for your site? Getting links directly from topically relevant sites considered "seed" sites or links from sites who have links from "seed" sites is the key to higher ranking.
The importance of the link anchor text
Every one of the above off-page factors are very important, but probably none of these factors have as much influence on your search engine ranking as the inbound link anchor text. Since the search engines can only understand links in terms of the clickable link text it crucial to ask your link partners for very specific link text formatting with your keywords in the inbound links.
Request some of the inbound links to point to sub pages of your site with anchor text that matches the title tag of the target page. Ask for some of your links to be pointed to internal pages like the illustration below targeting a different keyword phrase. This type of linking is also referred to as "deep linking. Ensure, you point at least 30%40% of all links to the sub pages of your site with the appropriate target keywords that match some of the keywords in the target page title.
Changing the anchor text in the inbound links and pointing links to sub pages accomplishes two things:
A large number of links to sub pages suggests to the search engines your site has a wealth of information to offer its visitors and should be considered a serious resource. A shallow inbound linking structure and nearly identical anchor text in the majority of inbound links to the home page is a clear sign of link manipulation by the search engines. The most likely penalty will be an almost non existent ranking for the target keywords most often found in the inbound anchor text.
Getting high ranking for secondary keyword phrases can't be accomplished without inbound links to sub pages targeting secondary key phrases. If the inner pages are not receiving any direct inbound links, they will most likely not rank well for highly competitive keyword terms.
Conclusion
Link popularity is the driving force behind top engines rankings. Over the last few years Google has gotten especially good at separating the low quality links from the really valuable ones, and it's proven by the relevancy of their results and overall worldwide market share. The good news is we can all learn a lot about how our competitors get top ranking by studying carefully their inbound links and examine closely what those links say about their site, i.e. anchor text. It's your job as a webmaster to study, and test the affects of the off-page ranking factors. You can turn this knowledge to your advantage by building even stronger link popularity for your site.
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