South West eCommerce

Most people know that improving your rankings in the major search engines means making modifications to your website content and code (eg. adding your main keywords to your title, description, text, and so on).

But many people do not know that an equally important factor in high search engine ranking is link popularity. That is, the number of websites pointing to your website. In fact, link popularity can be more important than the other factors, as this simple test shows:

Go to Google and search for “click here”. Depending where you’re searching from, the number one position will most likely be Adobe Reader. You’ll also see that they are ranking number 1 out of around 1,430,000,000 websites competing for that term.

Click on the Adobe link to visit that site. Notice something about their page? Nowhere does it say “click here”. The words “click here” are not anywhere on that page. Not in their title, not in their description, not in their content. So how on earth do Adobe rank #1 out of of 1.5 billion websites when their site isn’t even optimised for the keywords “click here”?

The answer is link popularity. There are literally millions of websites out there that link to Adobe (in order to download the free Adobe Reader program). Most of those links will be written like this: click here to download Adobe Reader. So as far as the search engines think, there are millions of websites out there saying that the Adobe website is related to the term “click here”. That alone is enough to list it at the top of the search results, even without any other optimisation work.

So what does this mean for the rest of us? While “on page” optimisation is very important for high search engine ranking, don’t underestimate how powerful link popularity is. You should make it a long term goal to be constantly trying to build incoming links to your website. The more links you have coming in, especially from reputable and popular sites, the higher your website will be listed in the results.

To address this important factor, our Search Engine Optimization services have recently been revamped, to greatly increase the work done on increasing “backlinks”. If you’re working on your search engine ranking, either by yourself or through someone else, make sure that link building is covered.