How To Do Link Popularity, by David Notestine Cyber-Robotics, in a typical month, gets over 2 million hits; however, we only average 3 to 5 visitors per day from the search engines. Do the math - that works out to anywhere from 84 to 155 visitors per month provided from the likes of Alta Vista, Lycos or Yahoo. Very small numbers when compared to 2,000,000 hits. The secret to our success lies in the sheer number of links that point in our direction. This is how truly qualified traffic comes in our direction, and this is the best means securing visitors to your site as well, as long as everyone is linking to only websites that match each other's subjects or themes. You can check your site's popularity on the web in just a matter of minutes. Currently, there are a number of services out there that provide link popularity checking. Notable among these is LinkPopularity.com - http://www.linkpopularity.com They provide this service for free and offer tips on how to improve your link popularity (Not only that, but there is nothing to stop you from entering a competitors URL and checking them out!). One thing that you need to be on the alert for are services that offer to improve your traffic by means of automatically generated link pages for you to post in your website. On paper, the potential they offer looks good. But the pages are usually chaotic, with no themes or common thread at all. This is a quantity versus quality approach, and may actually derail your efforts. Since you are linking to a number of sites on pages that lack cohesive themes, you simply have no way to know if those other sites have any traffic at all that has any bearing whatsoever on your themes. If most of those sites have little traffic, say less than one hit per day, then what good is it to be linked in this way? Not only that, but you are actually being even more counterproductive; to belong to a consortium such as these, many times you need to put up banners that may advertise competing products, and then they may even want you to host another page of links and submit them to search engines. You are aiding and abetting them in this sloppy method of link production (and that's all it is, link production)! It begs the question; is this the way to bring in truly qualified traffic to your site? The answer to this question is no. What you end up with is pages full of potentially unrelated links, and your site being added to a similar page elsewhere! Is this the way to get qualified traffic? Of course not! As the search engine's robots evolve, they are becoming even more aware of sites that link like this. If you have pages like this, you are actually doing yourself a disservice, because the search engines will not help you out. Even the Zeus robot will back out of pages like this; it views them as cancerous growths on the body of cyberspace! The real solution is simple; you need to be linked to common sites, or themesites. This is the best way to improve your traffic. Again, look at the numbers. The more links you have, the greater your traffic. You want that traffic to stay and look around your site, not pop in and right back out because it was not what the visitor was looking for. If you have a common theme to the site that sent you the traffic, chances are they will be real qualified visitors. This is the real secret of Internet marketing. For years, the search engines and their backers made it appear that they were the only game in town. More and more, as the way the web operates evolves, the less this is so. Again, look at the numbers at Cyber-Robotics. The more links you have, the better your traffic, bottom line. Once you have those, then you are really on your way to getting the traffic that you want, and the traffic you deserve. So, in short, you need to - - Check your link popularity to see if it needs improving - Build the links you need to increase your qualified traffic - Improve your site's content to help you keep the traffic once it arrives - Stay away from sites that provide quantity over quality By following these steps, your site and your web-based business will reap the benefits of improved links. Content has been reprinted with permission of the author. First appeared in http://www.cyber-robotics.com, © 2000 - 2001 David Notestine, all rights remain with author.