Link Popularity: What Other Sites Say About Your Site's Quality
Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of external Web pages that link to your website. In the past, the sheer number of links
to your site would result in higher search engine rankings. Today, in many of the major search engines, it is the quality, or relevance of the
content that links to yours that is the major factor in achieving prominent search engine rankings.
Many search engines consider off-the-page-criteria to determine comprehensive and high quality website content. Links from outside websites have
become "references" that define a site's reputation - literally serving as "votes" that validate that the owners of another site find the content
on your site to be valuable and relevant to their visitors. Therefore, knowing who links to your website, and working to increase the number of
quality, relevant links are critical components of any online marketing strategy.
As you know, the prominence of your website's placement within the search results of the major search properties is vital to the quantity and
quality of your site's visitors. Your prominence on the Web depends heavily on how well linked your site is within its specific Web community.
Web communities are a vast network of contextual linkages among like-minded Web pages. There's no one secret trick to achieving prominent search
engine rankings, but boosting the link popularity of your website may give it the edge it needs to be listed near the top of the search results on
words which drive the most qualified traffic to your site.
