How To Increase Link Popularity

These days there is a case to be made for building link popularity as being the most important website optimization factor, even above keyword density and other on-page factors. Did you know that there are little-known but excellent methods to greatly increase your link popularity...

Three or four years ago the most important factors in determining where your website appeared in the search engine results pages had not to do with building link popularity but lay in on page factors. In other words it was the wording and positioning of the wording on your page which was the all-important factor. Your link popularity score was just another factor, and in those days it had much less importance than it does today.

Your title tag was especially important (and to some extent it is still is), closely followed by the keyword density of your page text. If you wanted to rank well for a particular keyword phrase then you had to increase that phrase and variations of it in your text until they reached a percentage rate of roughly between 1% and 6%, this varying with choice of keyword phrase, search engine, etc. These days such factors still matter, especially for pages that target keyword phrases for which there is not a large amount of competition, though effective keyword density rates seem to have come down well below 6%.

Increasing Link popularity as the possibly most important determining factor in search engine optimization really came to the fore with changes that took place in Google and in Yahoo during 2005. That was a year when many previously successful web sites found their rankings in the search engine results pages plummeting rapidly or being lost altogether. Because they had fewer inbound links such sites could not sustain or increase their ranking positions.

So, as building link popularity is now such an important factor, the question is what strategies can website owners and webmasters use to significantly increase link popularity? There was a time when the simple answer to this was reciprocal linking with other webmasters. In those days email requests for link exchanges were opened and replied to more than 50% of the time, and traffic and link popularity could be built using this method.

However, those days are now largely a memory for most webmasters. Today webmasters receive so many spammy requests for link exchanges that they have given up even opening the emails. Even if today's webmasters can forge linking alliances it is frustrating and time-consuming work, and as most of these alliances are reciprocal linking in nature their value in SEO terms is questionable. So how do today's successful webmasters increase link popularity?

The answer lies in 'Power Linking' techniques. Read more...

Hugo Durrant writes for More Website Traffic at TrafficFolder.com. You are welcome to re-print this article provided you do not edit it in any way. The closing paragraphs must be included also, complete with unedited and clickable links. We can check this through the search engines.