With the increasing use of "links" as a criterion in search engine algorithms, the Web has been abuzz with the importance of "link popularity". If you want to have your site found in today's search engines you need to focus on how many and who is linking to you.

But what really is "Link Popularity"?

The Basics:
Let's take a brief look at the basics. "Link Popularity" is a measure of a page's importance on the Web. This is different from the traditional approach of relevance taken by many search tools.

Relevance measures how well the content of a particular page matches a specific query string, "importance" on the other hand refers to a page's worth, without regard to the content. By linking to a page other site owners are making a statement about the perceived worth of that page and so confer some value on it. The more links the page has the more perceived value the page can be assumed to have and therefore the more importance the page has.

Of course, not all pages have the same value to confer. Some pages are more important than others are, and a link from an important page confers more value than a link from an unimportant one.

So: an important page is one that has important pages pointing to it! While this is the proverbial story of the chicken-and-egg, it is easy to grasp intuitively. For instance, a link to your site from the UNICEF web site ought to confer more value than a link from your Aunt Daisy's home page. That's not just because your Aunt Daisy is biased, or because the UNICEF site has more traffic, but because the UNICEF link provides a greater degree of credibility which we as humans in some vague way understand.

Although easy enough to grasp, measuring the relative importance of billions of inter-connected pages seems hopelessly complicated. Luckily the big search engine sites have huge amounts of computing power which makes this task relatively straightforward!

So how does this help us?
Now that we know how search engines define "importance", we can see how we can enhance our site's own ranking. Obviously we'd all like to have links from important pages, but any inbound links help to increase our popularity. Moreover, while links from sites with considerable traffic may generate more referrals, they don't necessarily help our link popularity unless they have a lot of inbound links themselves.

Building a network of sites linking to you is where reciprocal linking campaigns help you. This is one of the benefits that Reciprocal Marketing! provides!

For more information on Reciprocal Marketing! contact our customer services or call +44-70-9230 1211.