Link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to and from related websites and is an extremely important method of improving your web site's relevancy in search engines.

By using our Link Popularity Checker Tool to check your web site's link popularity rating. You'll find out just how many websites link to yours.

There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your website; internal, incoming and, to a lesser extent, outgoing links.

Let's take a look at each one in more detail.

Internal Link Popularity

Internal link popularity refers to the number of links to and from pages within a site. I recommend cross linking your important related pages. This helps search engine spiders find and index your most important pages quicker, especially if some pages are buried deep within your site.

Site Map Link Popularity

Site maps are visual models of a site's content that allows users to find specific content or page.

Site maps are like interactive table of contents, with links leading to most, if not all, pages of a web site. Site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the site's information into increasingly specific subject areas.

If you have more than a dozen pages, I recommend you include a site map in your website. Then add a link to the site map page from the home page, and on other pages. This way search engine spiders will find the site map, crawl the links and index your entire web site greatly increasing your website's link popularity.

Incoming link Popularity

Incoming link popularity refers to links pointing to a site from other related sites. In addition, there are two types of incoming links:

1. Link popularity from websites you control

We recommend cross linking all of your web sites. Select keywords that describe the site you're linking to. The reason for doing this is because some of the major search engines, such as Google, place a great importance on the text used within, and close to, links.

2. Link Popularity from websites that you don't control

There are two ways of finding websites to link to yours. The best way to get other websites to link to yours is to ask them politely. And the best way to find likely candidates is to ask websites that link to your competition.

To find out which sites are linking to your a particular competitor, visit a search engine such as Google and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors domain name (with and without "www").

For example:

link:google.com
link:www.yahoo.com

To check the link popularity of your own sites, simply use your own domain name.

Do not forget that all the sites listed in the same category as yours in the major web directories, such as Yahoo! and Open Directory Project, are ideal link candidates too.

Once you have compiled a list of related sites, add a link to them in your site. Then send an email to each web site owner informing them that you have linked to their website and politely ask them for a link back to your website.

Another way of finding sites to increase link popularity to yours is to find sites that accept url submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for:

"add url" & "your keywords"

Include the quotation marks to ensure the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you enter. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following sets of search phrases:

add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link

As you can see link popularity is crucial to search engine ranking and our link popularity checker tool is a simple, effective resource for monitoring and maintaining your website's link popularity