The number of websites that link to your website is one of the factors that help search engines determine your relevancy for a search term. Link popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your website have proven to be a popular concept for people seeking to improve their search engine rankings.

What is link popularity and how exactly does it work?

Search engines don’t just look at the content of your website to determine if you are a match for a search. They also look at the number of outside websites that can validate, by linking, that you are a good match.

Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that link to you. This means if the New York Times links to your site, your credibility is higher than if Joe’s Online Newspaper provides a link to your website. Search engines also consider the text contained in the link that is pointing to your website. If the text in the links contains keywords you are trying to compete for, the search engines consider your site to have even greater credibility.

Since link popularity has become a factor that people feel like they have some influence over in determining their search engine positioning, many solutions have been proposed for growing your online link popularity. One of the more popular ways is also one of the least effective.

Several software programs have been written that help you create lists of websites in your space that might be willing to link to you. These programs also help you gather the email addresses for these sites and even help you craft an email requesting that the site add a link to yours.

The concept sounds good but the results are often mixed. If you use one of these tools and simply follow the templates they give you, your email will read like a spam message that won’t be taken seriously.

The best way to build long-term link popularity is to offer good content and features that provide real value to your audience. As people discover your website and realize its benefits, the likelihood of them linking to your website naturally increases.

There are several critical targets if you want to build up your link popularity without appearing to be a spammer. The first is good links from Yahoo and the Open Directory Project. Both of these sites are human based directories that have a lot of influence over search results. If your site is listed in the correct category and has a good description, links from these two websites are seen as validating you are the real thing.

The second place it’s important to have a link from is topic specific or niche directories. These are websites that are dedicated to news and information that is an exact match for what you provide online. If you have a website that deals with tractor parts, being listed on sites that focus on tractors is very important. In the case where a niche website doesn’t know about your website, it’s okay to ask them to link to your website. But your message should be personalized to them and also tell them the benefit or feature their users will get from linking to you.

Link popularity will continue to be an essential factor in successful search engine optimization and marketing initiatives for the foreseeable future. Links are a helpful tool for search engines trying to wade through billions of documents and find ones that are relevant to their users.

On Page” simply refers to the text and content on your web site pages. On Page SEO simply means editing your page and content so the Search Engine can find your webpage when a surfer is searching for your web sites particular topic.

This includes several steps like putting h1 tags on pages, URL optimization, Sitemap generation, title tag optimization, meta tags optimization, alt tags putting into pages for the images etc.

If you are doing on page SEO for any page the following points should be considered.

• Make sure that you have unique content on every single page. Duplicate content may cause google Penalty for your site.
• Make sure that your meta-tags are arranged correctly – your page title tags and description tags should describe the content of your different web pages. The page title tags should be less then or equal to 65 characters and the description tags more detailed but less then 150 characters.
• Make sure that the headings are properly inserted using H tags.
• URL’s play a very important role in SEO so Make sure that URL’s of Pages are Optimized correctly.
• Make sure that the links within your site are complete i.e. use the complete URLs for the pages instead of just the pages name.
• Make sure that you correctly optimize the alt tags for your images.
• Make sure that yoursitename.com and www.yoursitename.com are both referring to your site. Make proper use of 301 redirect to ensure that there is only one version of your home page.
• Do not provide any link to site that you don’t trust this may lower your ranking.
• Make sure that your site is free of errors, use w3c validation rules to check that.
• Avoid to use Blackhat techniques of  SEO.

If you follow these guidelines you are on your way towards good on page SEO and to good rankings in the search engines.

On-page search engine optimisation is very important and below are 9 tips to help ensure you get the most from it:

1. Page Titles – Need to be unique, relevant, individual per page and most importantly contain your main keywords and these shout what your page is about so get them right.
2. META Descriptions – should be unique per page, include your keywords and be good sales copy as this will be displayed more often than not in the search results and is key to getting a searcher to click on your entry.
3. Content – This must be unique, good quality and contain your main keywords but do not spam it to the extent where the copy does not read properly as it will never convert.
4. Internal Linking – use keywords in the links you use to link the pages of your website together as this will increase the value of the link and the perceived relevance of the page you are linked to.
5. Headers – Make proper use of your headers starting with your prime title as a H1 and work down as this will be used to decide which phrases are most important on your page.
6. Alt Tags – Primarily used by screen readers to interpret an image to a visually impaired person, the search engines also use these to find out what the picture is about, so be sure to use your keywords where appropriate.
7. Sitemap – ensure you have a sitemap and that it is linked off of your homepage as this will ensure all of your websites pages get found and crawled.
8. Validate – go to the W3C website and ensure that your website validates. If it does it will be easier to crawl and the robots are less likely to get stuck on your site and give up.
9. Get a Blog – Blogs are fantastic as the search engines love fresh unique content and Blogs ensure they get it. Also its a great way of becoming a source of knowledge for your industry and will see you gaining more links and business.