Link Popularity

If you are already familiar with link popularity, we encourage you to look at our various search engine positioning services. The more incoming links you have (from other websites), the better chance your search engine rankings will improve. It's not just the volume of incoming links, but the quality and relevance of the websites in which they come from AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, what words are used within the link (i.e. "anchor text") which determines how well you should be ranked for a target search term. 



The blue underlined words in the paragraph above (search engine positioning) is an example of anchor text within a link pointing to our home page. If a competitor of yours is both optimized AND has a stronger number of back links from quality, relevant website with proper anchor text, they are going to outrank you. Link popularity has become THE dominant factor in who ranks the highest within Google. Other major search engines such as Yahoo and  MSN also give a strong emphasis to back links for their ranking criteria. 

The Power of Anchor Text
Search for the words click here and you will see Adobe's Reader download page coming up first in Google. Interesting enough, the words click here do not appear anywhere within their title tag nor anywhere on the content of that page. Yet, they rank # 1 out of 857,000,000 results. The reason is they simply have more links pointing into their website (using the words click here as the anchor text) than any other website.  On a smaller scale, if you are targeting a fairly niche industry, you may only need a handful of strong, relevant incoming links (using your niche target search terms within the anchor text) to move you to the top of the rankings.

If Link Building is so powerful, do I still need to be concerned about internal optimization efforts?
The answer is a strong yes. Proper use of unique title tags, site maps, link structures, header tags, alt tags and good content is foundational to communicate to the search engines what your page is about. Most search engines pull your title tag as the first line of text within their search engine results. Bottom line... you have to work on both. This is why our packages include both optimization AND various link building services. 

LINKS - A growing issue among Search Engine Experts
While attending various 'Search Engine Strategies' conferences over the last year or so, we could not help but notice that there is an ever increasing focus on link-related workshops, including workshops dedicated strictly to purchasing text links. Matt Cutts, a software engineer and well known spokesman for Google, shared at one of the link-related sessions that he personally felt that the best way to receive incoming text links was to offer something unique and/or helpful to the public and that this would generate free incoming text links without even asking. He gave extreme examples of very creative websites which have caused a media stir. However, the truth is coming up with something exciting to say about reverse vacuum pump manufacturing or single-mode fiber optic tool kits is easier said than done. A majority of companies do not offer a medical cure, nor are they interested in offering funny games to play. Most of our clients have small humble websites which simply offer clear information about their humble products and services. Simply waiting for other websites to give them free, one-way text links without exchanging links or paying for an ad is usually not going to happen.

Most common ways to improve Link Popularity:

• Offer new and helpful information on your website which will hopefully cause others to link to you without even asking. 

• Submit to directories whose listings are known to generate valid back links (we offer this here).

• Purchase text link ads from quality sites who are relevant as possible (we offer this here).

• Distribute press releases to news related sites to generate qualified traffic (we offer this here).

• Ask business partners, vendors, distributors, family members, golf partners, etc. to link to you.

• Ask non-profit organizations if they would post a "contributor" link to your website in exchange for a financial gift.