Essential SEO Tools - Link Popularity

You have a great website, but it still does not get the traffic you want. Besides spending $$$$$ of dollars with paid search you want to know how to take advantage of the free stuff... natural search.

Having some key information at you disposal will help guide you in your quest for search engine dominance. If you haven't used the right SEO tools to check your sites' performance and make the necessary changes you are missing the boat.

Get The Right Link Popularity Tool

One of he most important things you need to use is a tool that measures the Link Popularity of your site. This requirement stems from the simple fact about search engines, they calculate the page ranking for your site based on the number of back-links you have.

What is a back-link? A back-link is a link that points "back" to your site, usually from another site.

If you have a large number of sites that provide a link to your site for a certain keyword, the search engine takes it to mean that your page must have some authoritative content. In such a situation, the page ranking for your site begins to climb.

A Link Popularity tool measures this metric and gives you a clear performance picture of the popularity of your website.

Back-link checking does not end here. You could have sites linking to your home page or they could be linking to a specific page in your site. This is called a deep page link. For obvious reasons, a deep page link is preferable to a mere home page link. Search engines weigh your links accordingly. A back-link checking SEO tool will give you specific information on this so you can create a strategic plan to convert as many of these home page links to deep page links.

Understand The Page-Rank System

As if this was not enough, all search engines employ a page-rank system where they grade websites according to links and other parameters. If your website has a number of back-links from high page-ranked websites, search engines evaluate it as more relevant and give that link a higher rating. So having links from just any site is not always the best case scenario, but having deep page links from high page-ranking sites will give your site more weight with the search engines resulting in more and higher natural rankings.

You may not be able to measure these parameters manually, because you will probably never know which websites provide links to you. However, with the right Link Popularity tool that is built for the job, you will be able to get a good indication of where you stand.

As is evident from the preceding discussion, a good Link Popularity tool will be able to tell you how you stand and how to make an early correction before market forces tell you to. Do remember however, that all Link Popularity tools are only tools. Their application is your responsibility. Your journey begins with producing a great product and bringing it to the market. If you have a great product, smart use of a Link Popularity tool can increase your chances of success.

Tom Dwyer is a former senior executive at one of the largest interactive marketing agencies and now spends his time consulting with businesses and organizations on all aspects of business life. Visit Tom at Talkin' With TommyD