What is Link Popularity, its Building and Strategies for Improving Full Story

Link popularity is one of the most important factors in top search engine ranking. Search Engines give importance to the web site which have incoming or backward links from quality and theme based related web sites. Search engines consider these incoming links as VOTE for your web site which is given by others quality web sites to select your web site on top or as winner web site in search results.
It does not mean the number of sites pointing to your site is your link popularity and the more links for your web site, the higher your ranking will be. Search Engine are very intellegent and they have very advanced ranking algorithms to find the relevancy of incoming links related to your web site.

How does Link Popularity work ?

Here's an example of how I believe link popularity works:
Let's say that "Hotels Web Site" Web site has a link to "Web hosting web site". This probably won't help "Web hosting web site" link popularity for the keywords "Web Hosting" However, if both "Hotel Web Site and Web Hosting Web Site" are located in the India and in both the India keyword is mentioned on the page some where, and people are searching for "india web hosting" the quality of that link, may have just gone up a little. There's now a common word (India) between the sites. It probably won't help for those people simply searching for "Web Hosting", but may help if they're searching specifically for "Web Site Hosting in India". A higher quality link for "Web Hosting Web Site", however, would be one from "Web Hosting Related Pages or Directories," which has a theme of "web hosting". That is exactly the kind of link that the search engines would credit toward link popularity. The key is in having that common thread between the sites.

What to do to increase the link Popularity ?

Directories Listing
It is important to note that the sheer number of incoming links is not as important as the quality of the sites that are doing the linking. It is important to get listed in the popular directories, such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org). yahoo can list for free for non-commercial sites ( Although it takes a while to get listed) otherwise you have to pay for listing in Yahoo Diretory and while listing in DMOZ search the proper deep category in the directory and read the guidelines and submit your web site. More directories you can search on the google like joeant.com, goguides.org, galaxy.com etc...

Finding Link Partners
After directory listing, search for theme based link partner web sites or theme based web site, when i say theme based i alwasy mean that if your web site is related to "web hosting" business, then search web hosting and web services web sites to get links. . Google is a best search engine to use when looking for theme linking partners by typing "your keyword + links" . Typing in keywords that you think your customers might use to find you, look for quality, well-ranked, non-competing sites that have "links" or "resources" pages. It is also very useful to look at each of the sites on these "links" pages, as many of them might also be potential link partners. When you have found a good number of sites, add a link to each of them from a "links" page on your own site. It is important to do this before contacting the site owners, as they are much more likely to reciprocate if they see that you have already taken the trouble to link to them. Follow these link partners until you get your site listed on these web sites and once listed, also take care that your link is not removed by the partners.


Forum Discussions
These days, search engine are giving much importance to the links from the discussion forum thread related to your web site, These are being considered as the backward links by the search engines. but be careful while taking part in these thread, the thread should be related to your web site business and the links given in the signature in the footer in your posting should be related to the thread.

For example, There in one thread is going on "Reseller web Hosting" in the disscussion forum, then if you take part in that disscussion and your links given in the signature are related to "clothes business" then there will be no advantage for you. The advantage will be if you use the links related to "Web hosting" Web Site in your signature.