Link Popularity

Links play an important role in the ranking of pages by the search engines. This has led to a mad rush for getting the maximum number of links which have turned them into a commodity, which are bought and sold. Somewhere in between people have forgotten the true potential of inbound links. Eric Ward in his article says

Lately Linkbaiting has become a big topic for discussion and there is a lot of buzz around it . Todd Malicoat has presented an excellent article on linkbaiting. Everyone wants and needs links. He draws focus upon the main classes of linkbait and gives the readers some great tips along the way.

Jim Boykin gives an over view of link buying and link building strategy. He says that:

Keep in mind that we don’t go for homepage links (99% only powerful subpages), and we work on getting links within the content area of webpages (something that looks like this), and sometimes we add co-citation (something I don’t want to talk about today). And yes, if we can get our ads above the fold, with a nice banner to boot, that’s even better (but not always possible).

Debra Mastaler explains three important tips for link building strategies at Search Engine Watch Forums. According to her, the development of corporate blog or corporate wiki plays a great role in the link building process. Secondly, article writing is another important step to attract media and consumer attention. Lastly, creation of a media center and RSS feeds of a site also influence link-building process.

Looking for a way to improve your search engine ranking, get listed in social sites or in sites such as digg, Reddit, and Fanpop, and it will help you generate links. We have heard it so many times, everyone is talking about it. Yes, its Web 2.0.  It has remarkably increased the importance of social sites. The social sites are those websites where readers have more content to add to the site then the owners themselves. There are three Web 2.0 based sites that are given proper significance by search engine marketers, namely, the bookmarking  site like del.icio.us, blog trackers and search engines like Technorite, and article recommendation site like digg.

Link building, although time-taking and sometimes confusing is unavoidable. You can't ignore it at any cost. Because link building is still the trump card of any SEO plan.
 Andy Hagans and Aaron Wall compiled a list of over 100 ways to build links and popularity entitled "101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006" which is definitely  one of the most exhaustive listing of link building strategies.

A new link building guide by Jim Westergren explains how to build links in 2006. It describes the "natural simulation" of link development and many methods of building links that is both natural and quick. However, read it carefully before you practise any of the methods as there are as many as 43 comments in the guide.