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In a general sense, link popularity is determined by the number and quality of websites that have linked to your website (often referred to as “backlinks”). The effects of link popularity are threefold: (1) links to your site give Web users ways to find your site while visiting other sites; (2) links to your site give search engine spiders (robots) trails to follow to find and index or re-index your site; (3) links to your site are essentially votes for your site in search engine ranking algorithms, but not all votes are counted equally.

When two sites are equally well optimized for search engine performance on any given keyword phrase, the search engine will generally rank the one with more link popularity above the other.

Google has a branded version of link popularity which they call PageRankTM.  You can see a website’s approximate PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar and visiting the page in question.  PageRank is not simply derived by counting the number of links to a given site.  A link from a site with lots of links or high-quality links pointing to it is worth more than a link from a site with few links or low-quality links pointing to it.  You can read the Stanford University research paper that started all the hoopla about PageRankTM or read Larry Page’s Stanford presentation, “PageRank: Bringing Order to the Web.”

Using advanced search options, you can search specifically for websites which have linked to your website at all the major search engines. You can use our Link Popularity Checker to get a monthly report e-mailed to you at no charge.

A spider is a piece of software that follows links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine databases.

Spiders follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. That is the primary reason why links to your site are so critical. Getting links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more opportunities to find and re-index your site. The more times they find links to your site, the more times they will stop by and visit. This has been true since spiders began. Recently there has been an incredible amount of attention paid to links. That’s because Google came clean and said in public that the number and quality of links to your site will directly impact its rankings in the search results.

AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Teoma, and Google all factor in the number and quality of links to your site when giving your site its ranking.

Spiders find Web pages by following links from other Web pages, but you can also submit your Web pages directly to a search engine and request a visit by their spider. In essence, that is search engine submission. Because so many millions of web masters have submitted their sites over and over, the search engines have responded by putting more emphasis on sites that their spiders find naturally and less and less emphasis on sites submitted directly. So, being found is better than submitting directly.

Search Engine Optimization Defined
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of guiding the development or redevelopment of a website so that it will naturally attract visitors by winning top ranking on the major search engines for selected keyword phrases.

Guide to Search Engine Optimization
In order to optimize your website, you need to ask yourself 3 questions:

1. How are people searching for my products and/or services?
2. Which sites are winning for those searches, and why?
3. Which searches can I win?

After you’ve identified a number of search phrases that are potentially winnable, you are ready to create a search engine optimization plan for your website.
First, review your website and determine whether you have significant content already developed that correlates closely with the keyword phrases you have identified. At a minimum, you need one page of well-written and useful content for each keyword family you have chosen. Each page should be entirely focused on exactly one keyword family. An excellent example is a page from an encyclopedia. For competitive keyword phrases, you will likely need to devote entire sections of your site to winning just one phrase.

Your Search Engine Optimization Plan
A complete guide to search engine optimization would be book-length, and would be out of date as soon as it was published, but here are several tips for building a website with search engine optimization in mind:

1. Every page on your site must have a unique HTML title tag, meta keywords tag, and meta description tag.
2. Follow W3C recommendations for HTML document structure. Begin the body copy of your page with your keyword phrase, and repeat it as needed as the theme of the page throughout your copy. Feature your keyword phrase prominently by including it in headers and making it bold or italics.
3. Use text navigation on your site, and use the keyword phrases you have selected as the links. If you cannot use text navigation, include a footer on every page using text links.
4. Build a text site map, and link to it from every page of your site.
5. Organize your navigation according to the importance of your keyword phrases. If you break your site into many pages, link to the most important pages from every page of your site, and link to the other pages from section header pages and the site map.
6. Establish your site by submitting to the major directories, The Open Directory and the Yahoo! Directory, then build your link popularity by submitting to web directories, search engines, and requesting links from related websites.
7. Be patient. A search engine optimization project can take quite some time to work.

Though meta keywords tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page. The meta keywords tag takes the following form:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords,keyword,keyword phrase,etc.”>

When you write a meta keywords list, start by scanning the copy on your page. Make a list of the most important terms you see on the page. Then read through the list. Pick the 10 or 15 terms that most accurately describe the content of the page. If you can’t narrow your keyword list down to 10-15 keywords, then the content on your page may be rambling to far. Because of the hyper-competitiveness of the current search engine placement landscape, pages need to be very focused on one or two specific keyword phrases in order to have a chance to get a top ten placement. For example, a page about northern Michigan apples and central Florida oranges doesn’t have much of a chance to win for either “northern Michigan apples” or “central Florida oranges.” To have any chance to win, you need to have one page about northern Michigan apples and one page about central Florida oranges.

Another example: If you page is a list of exercise or fitness tips, and on the page you list tips for things to do before, during, and after a workout, then you need to think to yourself, “what 10 or 15 words or phrases is this page MOST about?” Just because your page mentions dieting in the text doesn’t mean that the page is about dieting. If you want to win for dieting, then create a page about dieting. The ultimate example of a page which is focused and ready for search engine optimization is a page from an encyclopedia. Each page is brief, focused, and has just one theme.