Why do I need Link Popularity Building?

Building Link Popularity is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective search engine optimization campaign today. The 'off page' factors such as link popularity play a major role in your site's ranking in the search engine results page (SERP).

Link Popularity itself, refers to the number of links pointing to your site, from other sites. Link Popularity Building helps your website gain PageRank. A higher PageRank enables your site to rank higher in Search Engines with competitive keywords. The theory goes something like this: The search engine powers-that-be, have decided that if other sites are linking to your site, it must be a winner, therefore, it deserves a boost in rankings (when all else is equal). If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. People link to good sites, not bad ones.

Most crawler based search engines use link popularity as one of the factors in their ranking algorithms. As mentioned earlier, major search engines now go much beyond the number of links your site has, but try to determine the importance of each link and its relevance to your site. The idea is to get links from web pages that are related to your site for the search terms that you want to be found for. The search engines - and those that program the search engine algorithms - are not stupid. They are used to search engine spammers trying to cheat their way into getting a high ranking. Because of this, the search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a site ... most important is the quality of those links. It is important to understand that all links are not created equal. The search engines evaluate the incoming links on various parameters to determine the value of each site linking to you. Some important aspects which search engines evaluate are - PageRank of the linking webpage, total outgoing links on the linking webpage, industry relevance of the linking website, page relevance, keywords in anchor text, IP Classes of the 2 linked domains, etc.

The PageRank of your site's web pages is also directly influenced by your link popularity exercise. Therefore, a good link building exercise in combination with a successful search engine optimization campaign can get your website ranked high with the major search engines.

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