Link popularity is the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Internet. The search engines consider your site more important and rank it higher depending on the number of your sites incoming links. Building quality and relevant links helps you gain visitors from the linking site and you also boost your page rank with the search engines.

Every link that you do manage to gain, whether it’s from a directory, blog or website, will help build your site’s core strength. Here are just a few of the benefits of link building: 

• Links are viewed as a ‘vote’ for your site
• Inbound links offer a route to your site from other sites
• Links to and from relevant sites help search engines assess what your website’s overall theme is
• A higher link profile can boost your site’s credibility and trust
• More links means more avenues for website traffic to find you
• Improved rankings for your targeted keywords
• Improved search engine robot crawl rate

If you have numerous links to your web pages from spam sites and other low quality websites irrelevant to your business industry, this is not going to reflect positively upon your company. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. A Page Rank of 5, and a high traffic rank, receiving a link from an unpopular website, with no Page Rank, and scarce traffic will not help your search engine results rankings. Links can be  directories, social networking sites, blogs, even writing articles and optimized press releases. Directories are one of the most comprehensive ways to generate incoming links. They are designed to promote links and are sometimes ask for fees. Social networks and blogs have become a great way to generate incoming links to your web site.

As in most areas of SEO, some are more effective than others though. The relevance of the link and the strength of the site that has provided will often determine just how much strength you gain. Whilst quantity is extremely important, so too is the quality and diversity of a linking structure. In the process of link building, quality is more important than quantity. If you want to increase search engine rank of your website and also generate flow of traffic at your site then quality link building is the best profitable investment.

If you have numerous links to your web pages from spam sites and low quality websites irrelevant to your business industry, this is not going to reflect positively. If you have a selection of high quality links from respectable and trustworthy websites this is going to portray your business in a positive light and attract interest and attention. Find web sites that have some relevance to your site, business or products. A Page Rank of 5, and a high traffic rank, receiving a link from an unpopular website, with no Page Rank, and scarce traffic will not help your search engine results rankings.

A complete link building program involves generating links to your website from a variety of sources.  Having a good mix of quality and quantity in your inbound links will greatly increase your search engine results rankings and thus, drive more traffic toward your website.

The Magazine conducted the study in April 2010 and concluded 95 percent of respondents said SEO was important to their business, with 3.1 percent said they didn’t know, and only 1 respondent replied that it was not important. The survey found that 82.8 percent of respondents indicated their website is search engine optimized, while 11 percent said it wasn’t and 6.3 percent professed they did not know. In addition, the survey found that 40.6 percent of respondents “completely” understand SEO, while 54.7 percent understand it “somewhat” and 4.7 percent said they don’t understand it at all.

This news comes after a recent survey conducted by Genius found that many B2B organizations are missing out on opportunities to use SEO. Of the respondents, 32 percent of B2B companies didn’t use SEO tools, reported Genius. Similarly, many didn’t use social platforms, like blog software or social media, either.

A report recently released by Conductor reported that among the top 500 ecommerce companies based in the United States, the average grade it awarded for their use of SEO was a D. While most seem to understand its importance, many organizations have not implemented it as well as they could to enjoy optimum benefits. Without SEO, eCommerce organizations will struggle to draw both impulse online shoppers and those who use search engines to find the best prices for planned online purchases.

When it comes to search engine marketing, it seems natural search has emerged as the most effective. A recent study from Internet Retailer found that 51 percent of retail marketers said a quarter or more of their website traffic comes from natural search, compared to 28 percent who said so for paid search.

1. Broken links
2. Misspellings
3. Formatting issues
4. Forgetting to put in good unique title on each page
5. A good meta description.
6. Leaving an old copyright date
7. Forgetting to add alt text to images
8. Bad anchor text on the links
9. Images not reduced in size for speed
10. Clear headings that make sense to the reader

Much of SEO is just getting the basics right and doing so consistently.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The key is to get links from sites with a solid page rank that are in the same industry or area as your site is. This takes a little work. First you need to identify the candidates, look for industry leading blogs and other sites related to yours. For blogs, if you have some interesting content, then maybe they will write a post about it. So far, my favorite is to simply write a good post and add a link to them. Let them know you did it and often times, they will link to you in a future post. For websites, see if you can purchase an ad on their site or provide some content they would like for their customers.

You should try to control the anchor text of links coming to you as much as possible. Having your best keywords in the link anchor can be a huge help. Links from the body of a page are better than links from a side menu area and much better than links from a footer area.

All in all, getting good links takes effort but it is well worth it.

See also:

Page Rank Explained

Understanding the Importance of Keywords

Online Advertising

1. Do all of your page titles have the keywords you want for that particular page? Does the title describe the content accurately?
2. Does the description on each page reflect what you want the user to see on their search results? Does it have the keywords from the title included.
3. Does the body text of the page include the keywords from the title and description? Do you have enough content that a search engine could tell what the page is about?
4. Do you use alt tags in your images? Do the alt tags use your keywords?
5. Do you have good internal linking using keywords as anchor text within the body text?

If you make sure you have all of these steps well handled, you are far down the path of having a site that will rank well.

It is interesting to watch over time as improvements occur. An increase in search rankings, an improvement in bounce rate or pages viewed or repeat visitors. Changes in search traffic, since that is primarily driven by how many people search for related terms, tend to be gradual especially with higher volume sites; although, you may get a short term spike to a related news event. Referrers can radically change the amount of traffic they drive since your placement is driven by other factors. My favorite is Stumbleupon.com. You can get thousands of visitors per day for a week or two if you happen to be in their selected groups but then have that traffic disappear just a quickly as they rotate others into those spots.

One of the most powerful features of Google Analytics is the advanced segments tool. With it, you can select (or deselect) traffic that meets a particular criteria and then analyze that particular segment. One site I have has a couple of pages on jobs that went up years ago but attracts a fairly large number of daily visitors. Most of these visitors don’t help this local business, so we separate those visitors out for a different review allowing us to focus on just the visitors they are targeting. Another usage is to separate out a group coming in on a particular search term and review and contrast their experience on the site with others. Sometimes it becomes painfully clear where your errors lie.

Without segments you could make some mistakes. For example, bounce rate is a very important metric, but in most places in analytics it is summarized at a page or source type level. You may find a page with a high bounce rate and then decide to make drastic changes to it. The root cause may have been that the page draws a high volume of traffic from one search term that isn’t really related and that term experiences almost a 100% bounce rate, but the correct terms could have a very low bounce rate. Just using the averaged number creates a bad result.

Another place to pay attention is geography. If your site attracts worldwide viewers but your target audience is solely domestic, then you should segment that group out. Overseas visitors often do not have the same types of bandwidth, browsers and screen resolutions that domestic visitors do. If you are using your stats to help drive your web design (and why wouldn’t you???), it could very like alter your requirements.

What can you change?

I’ve always thought one of the easiest things to improve on an individual landing page is the bounce rate for a given term. It is easy to determine this value and often easy to understand why you have a higher than average bounce rate for the term once you review the context of the page. Then, just test a few different modifications that you think would better connect with the users of that term and keep the best result.

Google Analytics is free, simple to use, powerful and constantly improving. There is no reason not to have it on your site. Knowing what you visitors are doing on your site and how they got there is a critical piece of information for running a successful website.

Google Analytics Home Page

Along with the launch of Bing and its joining with Yahoo for search, the social media websites are starting to assert their presense. All of these present challenges to Google and the status quo. My feeling is that Google is staffed by a lot of very sharp people and like other successful companies will adapt and most likely succeed quite well.

It seemed that the Bing team was very excited about their future. I can only guess how they felt in years past where there product really wasn’t that competitive. They don’t feel that anymore. Bing is focusing on the entertainment, travel and shopping spaces initially. From the data we are seeing with our customers, it seems they are doing quite well in this area. We even have one customer where Bing is driving a higher number of visitors to a site.  Last year, nobody but Google was really even on the radar for search referals.

I’ll put together a number of posts on this show. As a team, we attended over 35 presentations, panel discussions and lectures.

I’ve worked with a number of sites over the years where the answer was no. Maybe their product was priced too high or nobody really wanted what they were selling or wanted it in the manner they were selling it. In my opinion, those issues really need to be addressed before spending a lot of time and money on a search engine optimization or web marketing plan that will bring in a lot of visitors that you won’t convert. 

The days of “build it and they will come” have mostly gone away. Now, with few exceptions, there are a number of providers of most services and products on the web, and differentiation is more and more difficult and challenging and requires a much more skilled approach than in days past. Driving traffic to a site today requires a good understanding of the on-page rules such as titles and keywords as well as the off-page rules such as anchor text and link quality. It also requires a strong attention to detail since computers don’t usually understand what you meant to do.

The real trick is conversion and this requires experience and technical skills. There are several web testing tools that work to evaluate multiple variations of a web presentation and track the results for each (such as Google Website Optimizer). Very often, the results can surprise everyone and I’ve yet to meet anyone who could consistently guess the results.  Experience and rules of thumb are great and necessary for helping determine what needs testing and some likely variations to start with, but it is rare that the final results don’t come in different than expected or have a much larger or smaller impact than thought. We’ve seen simple things like brightening a link color or changing the color of a button double the conversion rate. In one case, moving a search box to the middle from the right side and removing a border increased conversion by over seven times (Google blog article).

It is pretty simple to put together a pay per click campaign to evaluate how a site will perform. While not perfect, you can certainly get enough information for a go/no go determination. If your conversion rate is unacceptably low, then that should be the primary focus rather than building traffic. If it appears the conversion issues can be easily solved, then a parallel effort at SEO and social marketing is worthwhile since those always take some time to be effective. If the conversion problems don’t have a clear solution, then that should be your only focus.

One additional reason to focus on conversion first is that your conversion rate can impact your SEO effectiveness. The search engines measure how often your link in the results is selected and how long a visitor stays on your site. If you have a high bounce rate, then SEO is going to be tough.

Related Articles:

What is your Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate: What’s Your Website Tracking As A Conversion?

How do you get links from high quality sites?

a. Look at your vendors and customers. Are there opportunities to get links from them. Maybe if you have a good case study about a customer, they would link to it. Vendors could advertise their relationship with your company.

b. Create a blog and post to it regularly. This may take a while to build trust but it is a solid reference to your main site.

c. Write. Post on blogs, on twitter, write articles, write white papers and post them on your site and on other sites. If you can’t write, find someone who can. Good content is always in demand by quality sites.

d. Get the details right. The anchor text is important as it puts the link in context for the search engine and specifies the relevant page on your site. Focus and nail your 3 or 4 high volume ones first before diluting your linking with lots of variations. You do need to mix it up some but just a few variants is fine.

Be consistent, be detailed and never stop. It isn’t something that happens overnight, but something that grows over time. Your competitors are not stopping, even if you are #1, you can never stop.

Related Articles:

Link Building – Finding the Right Site

Building Back Links Is The Key to Successful Internet Marketing

A few hints for your initial testing: Use clear short concise statements. use colors of high contrast that stand out on the page. Place the call above the fold so that every visitor sees it (not all visitors scroll down on each page). There is no right answer for every website. We seen significant differences between what works on different sites. It depends a lot of the nature of the site, how it is typically navigated and I believe it also has a lot to do with the demographic of your visitors and their predominant preferences. Text links can work surprisingly well, you don’t have to always create elaborate graphics. For some sites, we’ve had the most success with a very clean site with minimal graphics and text links. For other sites where the customer expects graphics, text links don’t work near as well.

As with everything on websites, testing is everything.