Before we go any further, what is “link popularity”? In very simplistic terms, link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. Rather, the engines want links from authoritative sites, or links from sites that share the same focus as your site. When looking through this list, you may find strategies that are subject to abuse. Which is similar to link building. To write this article, we went to professional search engine optimizers for their ideas.
Basically you email or contact the Webmaster of a site that is complementary but generally not competitive to your own. Hence, links from these pages are more important — and important for the terms you are interested in — than links from other pages. Warm personal voice contact goes a lot further than a cold email or even a warm email letter. This is also similar to one way link building membership. Contact those Web sites, and ask them to link to you in return for a reciprocal link.
Inktomi’s link analysis program policy is that sites that link to its relevant topic category page on Yahoo receive improved hub factor rankings because of Yahoo’s popularity. But what if it does? What if the search engines check if your site leads back to them? What if they give 1% boost if you do? Would 1% matter if everyone else had 99% relevancy and you got an extra 1%? Hmmm, something to ponder. Think in terms of related fields as opposed to actual competition. Also don’t request links on a public bulletin board.
Regional directories can often supply plenty of incoming links. I am not a fan of reciprocal links unless they are complimentary. It’s also the toughest to do. Actually you win twice! First, because you have a good testimonial for your product/service and second, you’ve increased your link popularity — all with one link! Make sure that the link under the testimonial opens in a new browser window so that you don’t lose that visitor to the linked site.
As you do, more and more people will begin linking to your site, as they’re linking to your valuable content. Sometimes this can be similar to one way link building to many people. Have an easy way for people to link back to an article or content if they like it.