Linking

A website is pretty much ineffective unless you are getting traffic to it on a regular basis. The best traffic you can get to a website is free, targeted, organic traffic from search engines. In order to do this you will need to find keywords that are fairly easy to rank and then you will need link building in order to get it to move up the rankings until you get traffic.

Links are somewhat like votes for a website. The more votes (links) you get, the higher your web pages are going to rank for their keywords. If you have multiple pages going after different keywords, then you will have to build links to each page in order to get it to rank high enough where it will be in a position to receive traffic

Search engines to some extent, work on the thought that if other websites are linking to your website, then your site must be a good one and as a result it deserves a boost in rankings. When you think about it, people only link to good sites – not bad ones.

It should be noted that the process of link building can be difficult and some of the links that you will receive will do nothing to help your website. This is especially true if the page that you are linking to isn't indexed. If you are using link popularity as a way of driving more traffic to your website then you need to make sure that the page you are linking to is indexed.

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to gaining the help of link popularity is you should also have links back to your site from other websites which are promoting and focusing on the same sort of products/services that your business is offering. An example of why this is important is a sports site, which has links from a cookery site wouldn't work due to the fact the target market for these two sites are completely different and someone looking for the latest recipes wouldn't click a link that takes them to a site promoting the latest sports news – making the link pointless. You want to make sure that the sites that carry your link are along the same lines as your website so that you are attracting the same target market.

Important sites will attract many links and content – poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.

If you really want link popularity to work on your site it is important to ensure that you get your website looking and functioning to the best of its ability, which generally means that your website should be well written, provide useful information and be updated regularly. If your sites are up to these standards then you won't have to go looking for links due to the fact other sites will want to link to yours for their own benefit. This is more effective in the long run and is what will help your website get links.