How to Build Link Popularity

Very important to building your site’s natural search result status is link building. It is very important to have inbound links to your website from as many websites with a good reputation as possible. Basically, Google evaluates all websites and gives them a ranking for any given set of keywords. One of the primary criterion for rank is how many inbound links are going into your website, and which websites they are coming from.

Getting Links
There are many ways to go about getting links to your website.
One popular way is through seeking out vertical search engines and business directories.  A vertical search engine is a website that lists companies in a certain niche or industry.  It is important to find these for your own industry and get yourself listed.  These are typically free and I strongly caution against paying for any type of listing.

Another method of building links to your website is through blogging.  Bloggers are typically very conscious of other websites that are linking to their blog.  Many times if you have relevant content on your website they will give you a return link to your own website.  Also, commenting on other blogs is also an excellent strategy towards getting links to your site as most times you are able to leave a link to your website.

Building links in social media is ever growing in importance.  Search engines are now giving heavier weight to social media websites which means links found there are now stronger.  On top of that, high-quality social content will generate links to your own website from outside the social media world as well.

Not all links are Equal:
The greater the reputation or ranking for any website linking to you, the better the ranking for your own website. A link from Facebook, Yelp, a national media website, or a highly viewed blog such as Mashable is ranked very high by the search engines. On the contrary, a link from a local business directory with minimal pageviews is not ranked nearly as high. That means you want to strategically seek links from highly ranked websites in order to bolster your own ranking.  Find rankings for any website in the world using Alexa.  Obtaining links without investigating how highly ranked the linking website is, only wastes time and effort.

Track your links:
Keep a record of all the websites that link to you. At DK we maintain a spreadsheet with the listings, passwords, and other pertinent information to any website that links to our own site. There are also tools from all the major search engines that provide you with all the links they have found for your site, but they rarely will all agree about where your links come from on any given day. Yahoo Site Explorer is a good place to start researching your own links.

If you’re thirsting for more, find many more tactics on either of these 2 highly ranked locations:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml