Its been a long time saying that content is king. Well there’s something new in the SEO industry now, Link Popularity is the new king of SEO. Don’t misunderstand me, content is still king and is among the most important factors to get that page of your up in the search engine results but reports and statistics suggest that the popularity of the link on which that content is placed can make things even better, i.e. more popular your link, better the chances of your content being noticed by organic traffic originating from all over the world. This case is specially with Google and if Yahoo’s Trustrank is to be considered then Yahoo too implements this. Off-page optimization is extremely important, its like marketing your content just to get noticed by the search engines so that they introduce some priority to the content placed on that particular link.
Well, in this situation we are considering backlinks to a particular page that needs to be optimized. The most important factors in determining Link Popularity is :
- The amount of inbound links to your website.
- The relevancy and quality of these links.
- The anchor text attached to these links.
The Amount Of Inbound Links :-
You would say that the amount of inbound links surely determines the popularity of the page, but things are a bit different. I’m not denying that amount does not matter, ofcourse it does matter but search engines are getting smarter, they can distinguish which are spammed, irrelevant, etc.. kind of links and which are the genuine ones. While getting backlinks, the amont should be considered always. If you get 10 on one day and 1000 on the other and i were a search engine, i would for sure ban you from by listings. Google functions similarly, hence be smart, keep a moderate amount of links and generate and distribute them over a period of time.
Link Relevancy and Quality :-
I would say this is the most important aspect of Off-Page SEO. This may not have been the case 5 years back but considering the major steps taken by Google to kill spam since the past few years, Quality and Relevancy can determine how well you rank for a particular term and how popular your link really is. I’ll give a clear example :[Acc to today's results(10th Oct 09)] There’s a particular keyword which has 31000 global monthly searches.
The 2nd result : Doesn’t contain the keyword in the URL, Title and neither does it have a good keyword density for that particular keyword. It has 236 backlinks and ALL are relevant, some may be original while some may be put up while doing SEO. Almost 150 of these backlinks have the keyword in the the page title.
The 5th result : Has the domain name as ‘http://keyword.org/ (keyword = the actual keyword that we are considering), the keyword is in the title, has a good keyword density and the On-Page SEO is excellent. It has 12,400 backlinks, yes its true and still this page doesn’t rank well? The reason why the 2nd result outranks this is basically the quality and relevancy of the backlinks, many of the backlinks of the 5th result page are from Forum signatures and are practicallt irrelevant and ‘useless’.
The 2nd result : Doesn’t contain the keyword in the URL, Title and neither does it have a good keyword density for that particular keyword. It has 236 backlinks and ALL are relevant, some may be original while some may be put up while doing SEO. Almost 150 of these backlinks have the keyword in the the page title.
The 5th result : Has the domain name as ‘http://keyword.org/ (keyword = the actual keyword that we are considering), the keyword is in the title, has a good keyword density and the On-Page SEO is excellent. It has 12,400 backlinks, yes its true and still this page doesn’t rank well? The reason why the 2nd result outranks this is basically the quality and relevancy of the backlinks, many of the backlinks of the 5th result page are from Forum signatures and are practicallt irrelevant and ‘useless’.
Anchor text :-Anchor text defines everything, just having a link may be enough on a totally relevant and quality page where the keyword density of the keyword you are targeting is good, but for all other normal backlinks you need to have an anchor text attached. This anchor text has to be the keyword. Avoid using the same anchor text for a particular link everywhere as it will look suspicious to search engines. For those who don’t know, anchor text is :
Say your keyword is ‘hello donkey’ and the link you want ranked for this keyword is ‘http://www.blahblah.com/say-hello-to-donkey’ then you need to place the link in such a way :
hello donkey , here ‘hello donkey’ acts as anchor text to the particular link within href="". This is simple HTML, its the least you need to know as a Search Engine Optimizer 
