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One of the most important search engine optimization (SEO) tasks is developing link popularity. Not only because of Google, but because every major search engine now uses this criterion as part of its relevancy formula.

Link Popularity Began With Google

PageRank (PR) is an important variable in Google’s algorithm. It evaluates Web structure through link analysis to determine relevancy by means of “link popularity.” PR gives higher rankings to sites with many strong, quality links leading to their pages. These sites are deemed to be highly relevant because of the quality and number of these links.

To quote Google software engineer Matt Cutts, “Google’s PageRank search technology works by first identifying the link structure of the entire Web, then ranking individual pages based on the number and importance of pages linked to them.” Note that the quality of the backlinks is more critical than the number.

Beware of Link Farms

Linking no sooner became the rage than people began to look for short-cuts to link popularity. But there’s a right and a wrong way to create backlinks, and short-cuts can get you in trouble. One of these short-cuts was the creation of link farm services that provide hundreds of irrelevant links. Google calls this spamming and will remove sites associated with link farms from its index. Other engines also hate spamming and will do the same.

How do you define a link farm? It’s a network of sites that link to other sites for the sole purpose of increasing their PR score or link popularity. You get hundreds of links to your site from totally unrelated sites and in return, you must link to hundreds of other unrelated sites. This is counterproductive because you need to link to related information to provide value to your customers. In fact, if customers are sent to unrelated topics they’ll probably abandon your site out of frustration.

So how can you build link popularity the right way? You need to link to information that expands your customers’ knowledge in topics related to your business –topics of interest to them. There’s no short-cut for doing this, it takes due diligence. Below are five tips for getting started on the road to link popularity

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