Link popularity is one of the major factors used by search engines to determine a website’s popularity and position in their search results.

Search engines continuously spider the World Wide Web caching websites and their content. They follow newly found links to other websites and normally rank them in their search results based on a host of algorithms including link popularity and content.

The more inbound links a website has the higher the position it will achieve in search engines search results. This is not to say that this is the whole scenario as an inbound link from a major website would carry far more weight in the eyes of search engines than an inbound link from a lesser popular website.

It is not the amount of inbound links a website gains to give it link popularity but, the quality of the links to the website that is more often so used by search engines to determine a websites rank in their search results.

All of the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live actively crawl websites that have inbound links as they believe these links are a way to help them measure how relevant a website is.

With the above in mind, search engines use link popularity as one of the ways to give higher search engine results as in theory website owners and webmasters alike will only link to good sites rather than poor quality ones.

Two types of links which can help increase a website’s link popularity are links from a same themed website with similar keywords phrases and, links from niche directories or directories with same themed categories.

One of the most effective ways to build long term link popularity is to provide high quality. By providing exactly what your visitors are searching for and being well versed in your niche will entice other website owners to freely link to your site as they will be only too happy to have some type of association with leaders of your niche.

There are a number of ways website owners can build their link popularity as listed below but not limited to:

• Content Related Websites
• Blog Reviews
• Social Media BookMarking
• Article Distribution
• General Directory Submission
• Niche Directory Submission
• Promote RSS Feeds
• Press Releases
• Media Website Reviews
• Forums Signatures

Related posts:

1. One Way Contextual Links
2. Link Building Methods, Link Popularity, Backlinks
3. Link Farms
4. Trustworthy Web 2.0 Backlinks