What is Link Popularity?

When researching the Search Engine Optimization world, you will come upon many terms that are used frequently.  Link Popularity is one of those terms, but what really is it? Well Wikipedia has it as “as the number of links that lead to a particular page and the anchor text of the link”.  Well, what is that?  Let us look at the two parts of that statement.

First, the number of links that lead to a particular page.  Most people think that all of the links need to go to their home page, but that is not the case.  Depending on which page you are trying to sell more, that is the page you need to link more to.  Your home page will be able to transfer the authority of some of its links to your other pages, but maybe not enough to make that particular page strong enough to compete in the search engines.  So take time in figuring out which page you are trying to market right now!

Secondly, the anchor text of the link.  If your Business is called “Smith and Son’s” and your website is smithandsonswebsite.com and you make every link say CLICK HERE FOR SMITH AND SONS, then in effect, you are building for a search of SMITH AND SONS.  But when you look into Smith and Son’s business, they are actually dog groomers.  So to bring in the proper traffic, they would need to be catering to ‘dog grooming’ based phrases.  So make sure your links are giving proper information to the search engines of what you are trying to market your self as! But here is where it gets catchy with Google’s “Over Optimization” penalty recently rolled out. You need to try to have a good mix of link anchor text. Try to have around 40% be Branded Terms such as “Smith and Son’s”, 40% be general such as “Click Here” “Our Website” etc, then 20% targeting your specific keywords.

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