Define your Linking Strategy & Improve your Link Popularity

Link popularity & Google PageRank

Many search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, MSN) rank web pages according to their link popularity. This is determined by the number and quality of other sites linking to your site. In other words, it is important to have quality backward links to your site. For example, it is far more important and desirable to have a link from the home page of www.microsoft.com to your site than having someone's personal home page link to you.

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Almost all major search engines and directories today use link popularity to determine at least a portion of your ranking; thus, if you don't have any link to your site, it is very unlikely for your site to get a decent search engine ranking.

The Google PageRank is the implementation of the link popularity idea at the Internet's most popular search engine, Google. It is a value between 0 (no backward links) and 10 (hundreds of thousands of links); most web sites will have a value of 5 or 6, while only sites like www.microsoft, www.yahoo.com and of course www.google.com have a PageRank of 10 (aka PR10).

Google distributes a free tool that allows you to inspect a web page's PageRank: the Google Toolbar (www.google.com/toolbar). After installing it, your Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox Browser will have an additional bar below the URL field. The PageRank is indicated by a horizontal gauge; moving your mouse over that gauge will reveal the specific value of your PageRank, marked in green.

It is important to understand that the PageRank is just one part of the enormous equation that Google takes into consideration when it ranks search engine results. Having a PageRank of 7 or 8 will not automatically improve your ranking, as Google takes other factors into account, such as the usage of keywords, content and title tags.

Often misunderstood, each separate page of a web site has an individual PageRank. If you go to different pages on a given site, you will see that the respective PageRanks will differ. Normally, the home page will have the highest PageRank value, while other content pages on the same web site will have a lower PageRank. In this case optimizing your web site for search engines should have a focus on the home page, as it has the highest chance of ranking high.

Create a Linking Policy

If you decide to improve your link popularity, it is vital to come up with a strategy. As indicated before, getting thousands of links from personal home pages will not have the same positive effect as getting some quality links from sites with a high link popularity.

Thus, please keep the four rules of linking in mind:

1. Check the link popularity
If you want someone to link to your site, please check out their link popularity before asking them. If checking the link page with the Google Toolbar reveals a Google PageRank of 3 or less, it might not be worth your time.

2. Stay in the community
It is better to have links from sites within your community: if your site's topic is real estate, it is better to have a link from another real estate site than a link from a toy shop.

3. Be the only one!
The web page that links to you should have as few links as possible to other sites. This is because the "power" of the link is divided by the number of external links, so that you get the most power by being the only external link on that site.

4. Keywords in link
If you have any influence on the way a site links to you, ask the webmaster to include your most important keywords into that link. E.g., if you had a real estate web site and "real estate florida" was an important keyword for you, a link like this would prove to be beneficial to you:

Real Estate Florida: Get your Dream Home from XYZ Estates

If you keep these four principles in mind, it will only be a question of time until you end up with a decent Google PageRank of 5 or higher.

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