Link popularity can dramatically increase traffic to your web site. Well placed optimized links are an excellent source of consistent qualified traffic.

Developing quality links is critical for search engine rankings, yet most new webmasters do not really understand the basics behind link building strategies for Search Engine Result Page positioning, search engine marketing and web page ranking.

Link popularity is more than just the total number of web sites that link to your site. Link popularity is a combination of:

Total number of sites linking to you
Relevance of the sites you link to and websites that link back to your site
How key words are used in the link title, description and web page content of the sites connected by the links
The current link popularity of the two linking web pages

Major search engines factor Link Popularity into their relevancy algorithms. As a result, increasing the number of quality sites which link to your site will improve your search engine rankings and link popularity. Knowing who links to your site and increasing the number of complimentary links is an important part of any web site promotion effort.

It is well known that Search engine algorithms value organic link building - link building that progresses naturally rather than appearing artificial.

Search Engine algorithms including 'Jagger', the latest Google update, have been designed to eliminate fake link popularity created by link farms and instant additions of large volumes of unrelated links that artificially inflate a websites importance and increase search engine standings.

By not following the well known guidelines provided by Google, MSN, Yahoo and the others, webmasters will see their websites penalized (suffering loss of position from the top ranks) in the search engine's positioning or even eliminated. from the search engine indexes

So lets take a close look at what is happening with Search Engine algorithms and links to see how we can get better search engine rankings (SERP), link popularity, & Google PR

The quality, quantity, and anchor text of your links are what matter the most in organic link building. The more complimentary links pointing to your site, and the higher the PageRank (Popularity) of the pages they come from, the better. Of course there is a lot more variables and work to creating a successful search engine marketing link campaign than simply linking to every other willing site

Link context is another aspect of the search engine algorithms' website analysis. Link context analyzes the relationship between how a link appears on a page to keywords within the text of that page and the website's overall keyword theme

The authority and quality of a page also factor into search engine algorithm link analysis. A topical directory on a subject is deemed to be of higher authority than free for all links page. Thus it's important to have links on topical directories or web guides related to your sites subject matter. Having a few links from important pages will always be more important than having a thousand links on useless free for all link pages.

Since all links are not equal, the engines attempt to rank the importance of each link, and to understand the context of the link. The reason search engine algorithms place greater emphasis on link analysis is to provide better qualified information for user input web queries.

Therefore by using the right link types and strategy for building your website link campaign you can increase targeted traffic, link popularity, SERP, Google page rank and create a contextual link advertising network for your website

Learn how to use the 2 basic external link types that will increase your link popularity, search engine result position and Google PageRank.

Reciprocal links
One way inbound links

STEP 18 of SEO Marketing 101 introduces new webmasters to search engine friendly natural (organic) reciprocal link advertising stategies and methods.