This link building, or link popularity, strategy has gained immense success due to the crawling nature of most search engines.
.
Spiders crawl from link to link and store pages into their database. Link
popularity is generally gained through reciprocal linking. Other web
sites would usually point to your web site only if you have a link to
their web site from yours.
A few years ago, the number of web sites linking to your site gauged
link popularity; little emphasis was placed on the "content relevancy"
of the linking site. In an effort to gain more link popularity, "link
farms" began sprouting up across the web. For a nominal fee, a web
site owner could join link farms and enjoy increased link popularity
overnight.
Search engines caught onto this tactic and created better tools for
detecting legitimate links. Web sites that have links from web sites
with "similar" or "relevant" content score higher, thus earn better
placement in search engines.
Please, avoid joining "link farms"; some search engines consider them
a form of Spam and you may have your web site penalised for keeping
"bad company".
It is more important than ever to develop a solid "link-popularity"
strategy. One excellent, although time consuming, method is to simply
make contact with web sites that are complimentary to your site
requesting a link exchange.
When making a reciprocal link request it is critical that you
demonstrate that you have actually visited their site. And, don't
simply rely upon email, I have achieved great success with a quick
'phone call or by sending a letter via snail mail.
Link analysis is somewhat different than measuring link popularity.
While link popularity is generally used to measure the number of pages
that link to a particular site, link analysis will go beyond this and
analyse the popularity of the pages that link to your pages.
In a way link analysis is a chain analysis system that accords
weighting to every page that links to the target site, with weights
determined by the popularity of those pages. Search engines use link
analysis in their page-ranking algorithm. Search engines also try to
determine the context of those links, in other words, how closely
those links relate to the search string.
For example if the search string was "toys", and if there were links
from other sites that either had the word toys within the link or in
close proximity of the link, the ranking algorithm determines that
this a higher priority link and ranks the page, that this is linked
to, higher.
About the Author: To learn more information about Link Popularity &
Link Analysis I strongly recommend that you visit
http://www.Link-Advantage.com Copyright John Taylor PhD August
2005 - All rights reserved.