Link Popularity - Off-site SEO

Link popularity simply means the number of links you have from other web sites. The link from other web page is also known as inbound link or backlinks.

Generally, you will get links from other sites when they find your content interesting and of value to their visitors. Over time, the number of links grow will grow as more webmasters get to know about your website. The more external links you have, the higher is your link popularity.

This is one of the most important factors in terms of search engine rankings.

Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Beside the number of backlinks, the quality and the relevance of these incoming links will help to improve your page ranking.

You can also solicit for links and you may have to link to others before asking for reciprocal link. Be careful with who you link to. Make sure these are sites relevant to the overall theme of your Web site. Build you link partners slowly - the search engines expect the number of backlinks to grow slowly. Using artificial means to increase your link popularity may even get your web site blacklisted.

Tips on Getting Inbound Link

1. Use your keywords in the text link. For example,

Guide to SEO Copywriting
Offers tips of web page copywriting for both human visitors and search engine spiders.

2. Have a variation of text links. Using the example above, you can change the text to "SEO Copywriting Guide". This is to ensure that you have keywords variation for the incoming links so that they appear "natural" to the search engines.

3. Make sure you are NOT getting link from a page that has been banned by Google and/or Yahoo. To avoid being in the bad neighbourhood, use Google toolbar to check the PR rating of the web page. If the PR rating is grey out or zero, do not reciprocate the link.

4. Contribute articles. Allow others to use you articles for publication on their websites and make sure you include a resource box with link to your website. You can hire writers at Elance and Rentacoder to have the articles written professionally.