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 inbound 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 inbound links (using your niche target search terms within the anchor text) to move you to the top of the rankings.

Why are links important? Here is a direct quote from Google found on a page entitled, "Ranking":

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."
Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34432

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 search engine optimization AND various link building services.