Quick Tips for Gaining Link Popularity

Link popularity is the most important aspect of search engine optimization.  If your site has good content, good design, and good structure, that is fine, but you will never be successful without lots of inbound links.  Through link baiting, simply having the above can make you successful, but if you do not actually work on building link popularity initially, you will never attract the viral visitors necessary to spread your site around.  Here are several tips you should follow to make sure your link building campaigns go well.Do not even bother with link exchanges, they are nearly worthless and add so little weight to your site it is not even worth pursuing them.  Also, if you do too many, you can even be penalized by search engines.  In the rare case you do not know, a link exchange is when you agree to link to one site if they link to you.  In some cases, link exchanges can be somewhat valuable.  If the site you are trading with is very similar to yours, or if it has a much higher PR, the link exchange can be quite beneficial.  However, the link weight carried by a one-way link is still much higher than any link exchange could achieve.Companies usually buy links on websites as a way to get traffic, but text links are most useful for SEO purposes.  When buying links, make sure that they are static and not dynamic.  Dynamic links are structured like "http://www.example.com/out=502019" instead of simply "http://www.yoursite.com".  You may be tempted to buy tons of links from several small websites, simply because it is cheaper per link.  Only buy from highly relevant, high PR websites.  Although the price per link is much more expensive, and you may only be able to afford links from a few sites, the link power is so high that even one can overpower ten irrelevant, low PR websites.  Gaining links from reputable pages is the fastest way to gain credibility and high rankings yourself.  Even if you buy tons of high-quality links, if your site does not have a good design, you will not succeed.  Remember, the largest amount of your links should come about naturally, and people won't link to you if they do not like how your site looks.  Buying links should only be to initially get you visitors and SE traffic, but after that, you should focus only on link baiting.There are unique ways out there to build links that you can do throughout the entire life of your site (unless it becomes successful enough that you feel you do not need to build links yourself anymore).  One is writing content in exchange for links; for example, writing an article for a website in exchange that they link to you somewhere on their site.  If you are a good writer and approach a lot of sites, this can be a very, very good way to build links.  Even if the site only links to you on the page where your article is located, it is still a link.  Another good way to get free links is to befriend various webmasters by posting on their blogs and forums.  If you become established enough, the owner may give you a link.  This is time-consuming, however, and does not guarantee you links, but it is worth a shot.