I am sure you all have heard of the term ‘Link popularity’ when we talk about site ranking by search engine. Do you remember the time back in your high school when some students used to get extra priority and love from their teachers just for being popular? Well, this link popularity is also something similar. Link popularity is a measurement for number of links to your site from other websites. So basically it just shows you the number of people who likes your page and linked to it.

Search engines giants like Yahoo, Google, Msn has over ten billion web pages indexed on their huge database, so keeping this database structured and organized is not a piece of cake. So to keep everything in shape, all the search engines have developed and uses complex algorithm to measure the importance of all the pages. Thus, if your site is popular and loved by many other sites; you will be prioritized by the search engines.

How do I measure my site’s link popularity?

In general, it’s fair to say that your link popularity score is the total number of external sites that links to you. Link importance is strongly associated to link popularity, but with a twist. It looks at the type of external link and gives higher scores to high quality links. For instance, if you get a single link from a popular website, say About.com or CNN, that one single link might count a lot more than 30 links from other low ranked websites. If you are interested to know where you stand, you can use many tools available by the search engines to measure your site rank. But there is no single method to measure the score as each search engine has its own algorithm to determine it.

How do I improve my site’s link popularity?

Get linked, with as many sites as possible! Even if you have an awesome website full of fresh content, your site might be penalized by the search engine for not having enough links. The best way to get links to your site is to exchange links with other sites - ask for link exchange and provide reciprocal link in return. Don’t wait for webmasters to find you! Instead search the internet and find the sites which are related to you. All the sites will have their webmasters email address at the bottom, use it to send them an offer. Include your site description, no of visitors, benefits of linking to you etc. Usually if your site is good and stable they won’t mind as it doesn’t cost them money. You can also consider joining the link exchange programs to get quick links from many high ranked sites.

Just to sum up, always remember that your site is there to be found. So don’t hide yourself between millions of other sites, who are offering similar content, service or product like you.

So what are you waiting for? Get linked today!