Link popularity is among the most important factors in top search engine ranking. Search Engines give importance to websites with incoming or backward links from quality and theme-based related websites. Search engines consider these incoming links as VOTE for your website, which other quality websites give you to select your website on top or as a winning website in search results.
It does not mean the number of sites pointing to your site is your link’s popularity; the more links for your website, the higher your ranking will be. Search Engines are very intelligent and have advanced ranking algorithms to find the relevancy of incoming links related to your website.
How does Link Popularity work?
Let’s take an example of how link popularity, in my opinion, works:
Let’s imagine the website “Linking directory” links to the website “Web Hosting Web Site.” This is unlikely to improve the popularity of the “Web hosting website” link for the keywords “Web Hosting.” However, if both “Linking directory” and “Web Hosting WebSite” are in India, and the India keyword is mentioned somewhere on the website, and people are searching for “India web hosting,” the quality of that link may have just improved a little. Between the two sites, there is now a common word (India). It’s unlikely to benefit those looking for “Web Hosting,” but it might if they’re specifically looking for “Web Site Hosting in India.” A link from “Web Hosting Related Pages or Directories,” which includes a theme of “web hosting,” would be a higher-quality link for “Web Hosting Web Site.” That is the type of link that search engines will consider when determining link popularity. The goal is to have a common thread running through all sites.
What can you do to boost the popularity of your links?
Listing of website directories
It’s worth noting that the quantity of inbound links is less essential than the quality of the links’ sites. Getting your business listed in big directories like Yahoo and the Open Directory Project is crucial. Yahoo can list non-commercial sites for free (but it takes a long time to get listed).
Otherwise, you must pay to be listed in Yahoo Directory. When listing in DMOZ, you must first find the appropriate deep category in the directory, read the requirements, and then submit your website. More directories can be found on Google, such as joeant.com, goguides.org, galaxy.com, and so on…
Identifying Linking Partners
After listing your website in the web directory, look for theme-based link partners or theme-based websites. By theme-based, I mean that if your website is about “web hosting,” look for web hosting and web services websites to gain links. When looking for theme-linking partners, Google is the finest search engine to utilize. Type “your keyword + links” into the search box. Look for excellent, well-ranked results by typing in keywords that you believe your clients could use to locate you.
Forum Discussions
These days, search engines place a high value on links from related discussion forum threads to your website, referred to as backward links by search engines. However, be cautious when participating in this forum; the thread should be relevant to your website’s business, and the links in your signature and footer should be relevant to the thread.
For example, if you participate in a conversation about “Reseller web Hosting” in the discussion forum and your signature links are linked to “clothing business,” there will be no benefit. If you use the links relating to the topic, you will gain an advantage in the “Web hosting” Web Site in your signature.