Every search engine uses its own unique formula, called an algorithm, to index and score web sites. Search engines’ algorithms weigh various factors, such as a page’s design and links, to rank pages in their search results. By constantly refining and improving their algorithms, search engines hope to give their visitors the most relevant results.

Many search engines form partnerships and buy technologies to improve their algorithms. They combine many factors and place different weight on each one.

Webmasters who want their sites to achieve a Top 20 position spend a lot of time studying different algorithms. Even when several search engines rely on similar factors in composing their rankings, they may still rank the same site differently. For example, imagine two search engines both use meta tags and keyword frequency as their only ranking factors. If the first one weights meta tags as 70% of a site’s value and keyword frequency as 30%, and the second one does the opposite, their results will be completely different.

Understanding ranking factors

Before you can understand how each search engine scores web sites, you need to understand the various factors they consider. These factors can be divided into two categories: page-related and outside.

Page-related factors are concerned with keywords and their placement in the HTML. These factors include:

Format, placement and content of the title tag

Keyword frequency, weight, prominence and proximity

Use of the meta description tag

Use of ALT tags

Use of comment tags

Use of keywords in URL names

Alphabetical placement

Outside factors are not related to the content of your HTML. They include:

link popularity

Click popularity

Themes

Overall site design

Achieve results

You can improve most of the above factors to achieve higher rankings. Pay attention to what your competition is doing. Analyze their high-scoring pages and use their techniques.

As you find out more about search engines, start creating doorway pages. Use our tables with exact search engine information and techniques recommended by search engines themselves.

Why should I worry about link popularity?

A growing number of search engines use link popularity in their ranking algorithms. Google uses it as its most important factor in ranking sites. HotBot, AltaVista, MSN, Inktomi, and others also use link popularity in their formulas. Eventually every major engine will use link popularity, so developing and maintaining it are essential to your search engine placement.

Link popularity can do a lot for your site. Not only will many search engines rank you higher, but links from other sites will also drive more traffic to you.

Not just numbers

Link popularity is much more than a measure of how many links point to a site. Search engines use far more sophisticated formulas to gauge how popular sites are. In general, however, link popularity is measured by the following three factors:

Number of Links - The more, the better. Although lots of irrelevant links are less effective than a few relevant ones, they’re better than nothing. Inktomi, a company that provides search results to engines like HotBot, still values the number of links more than anything else.

Relevance - Search engines prioritize incoming links from pages that are relevant to the page in question. For example, if you sell puppy food, a link from a dog food supplier can boost your rankings more than one from, say, your sister’s gardening site.

Link text - The text used to describe a link can also affect your rankings. These three links all point to the same URL but use different text:

searchenginejournal.org

Search engine resources

Click here

Search engines’ spiders figure that any words other sites use to describe your site are particularly relevant. So, if lots of sites linking to you use keywords in their link text, search engines will boost your ranking for those keywords.

How do I develop quality links?
There are many ways to improve your link popularity. Perhaps the most effective method is a link popularity campaign, but this can be time-consuming and complicated if you don’t have a clear plan of action.

For a step-by-step guide to conducting a link popularity campaign, check out our subscribers’ section.

For a basic description of link popularity campaigns and other methods and programs that are used to achieve link popularity, see our article on increasing link popularity.

Submit new links to search engines
Every search engine assesses your link popularity by looking at the sites in its own database. Each engine’s database is unique, so for your link popularity score with a given engine to be high, all sites linking to you must be indexed by that engine. Though you may have 1,000 links in AltaVista’s database, if you have only 100 in Google’s then Google will rank you accordingly.

Search engines won’t automatically know every time you develop a new link. Since link popularity is search-engine specific, you need to make sure sites linking to you are indexed by every engine. Submit pages with links to your site to search engines so they can be indexed and start affecting your link popularity. You may want to ask permission from the sites first.

An Overview

Link popularity

Most search engines use link popularity
A quality link is relevant, rich with keywords
The measure of a site’s link popularity varies from engine to engine

Different engines, different rankings

Every search engine uses its own unique formula, called an algorithm, to index and score web sites. Search engines’ algorithms weigh various factors, such as a page’s design and links, to rank pages in their search results. By constantly refining and improving their algorithms, search engines hope to give their visitors the most relevant results.

Many search engines form partnerships and buy technologies to improve their algorithms. They combine many factors and place different weight on each one.

Webmasters who want their sites to achieve a Top 20 position spend a lot of time studying different algorithms. Even when several search engines rely on similar factors in composing their rankings, they may still rank the same site differently. For example, imagine two search engines both use meta tags and keyword frequency as their only ranking factors. If the first one weights meta tags as 70% of a site’s value and keyword frequency as 30%, and the second one does the opposite, their results will be completely different.

Understanding ranking factors
Before you can understand how each search engine scores web sites, you need to understand the various factors they consider. These factors can be divided into two categories: page-related and outside.

Page-related factors are concerned with keywords and their placement in the HTML. These factors include:

Format, placement and content of the title tag
Keyword frequency, weight, prominence and proximity
Use of the meta description tag
Use of ALT tags
Use of comment tags
Use of keywords in URL names
Alphabetical placement

Outside factors are not related to the content of your HTML. They include:

Link popularity
Click popularity
Themes
Overall site design
Achieve results
You can improve most of the above factors to achieve higher rankings. Pay attention to what your competition is doing. Analyze their high-scoring pages and use their techniques.

As you find out more about search engines, start creating doorway pages. Use our tables with exact search engine information and techniques recommended by search engines themselves.

Search engines differ in how they present their results and what kind of
information they give about each entry. Below you’ll find descriptions of
important functions that are used in presenting search results. Bear in mind
that search engines combine these functions in a variety of ways, and just as no
two engines generate the same results, no two engines rank results in the same
way.

Ranking order

Once a search engine has used your search terms to gather “hits” from its
database, it ranks them according to its formula for determining their relevance
to you. The factors weighed to create this ranking are often company secrets, so
understanding exactly why one entry is listed higher than another is often
difficult.

Here’s a survey of factors that search engines use determine relevance. They
include elements within a page and factors external to the page.

Ranking factors within a page

* Word frequency — How many search terms appear the document and how often they
occur

* Location of the search terms in the document — Search terms found in title,
heading, the first 200 words of text, etc.

* Relational clustering — How many pages from the site contain the search terms

* HTML design — Characteristics such as frames, broken links, loading speed,
ALT and meta tags

Ranking factors external to a page

* Link popularity — Sites with more links pointing to them rank higher

* Click popularity — Sites visited more often rank higher

* “Sector” popularity — How popular a site is with a given demographic or
social group

* Business alliances among services – Results from a partner search service
will be ranked higher

* Pay-for-placement — Site owners pay for high rankings

Let’s talk about how to raise link popularity.

Link popularity’s construction requires strenuous efforts to be made. You have to search infinitely. You have to send countless numbers of reciprocal links. Remember: writing articles on your theme can bring you plenty of link popularity.

What are the advantages of writing articles? If you do it, you place them on your site and than construct its content. You can also offer your articles to other sites. In both cases you’ll get a lot in exchange:
- You construct your content. The more is the content the better is.
- You advance your site. You’ll raise the amount of indexed pages by search engines, if you have as much key-words as you can on more pages.
- Other sites link back to yours. Sites, that are related to your thematic, link back to you.
- You get link back to your site from the site you submitted the article to. Don’t forget to inscribe a link in all guest articles you submit.
- You become an authority on your topic. Search engines distinguish sites that have a larger amount of backward links from sites connected with similar thematic.

Important notes
Your site’s pages must have relevant inbound links for additional traffic flow. One of the best way to get relevant inbound links corresponding your site’s content is to exchange links with directories containing categories that are relevant your sites content and put counters that show your site’s URL in top sites ranking, which also correspond your site’s content. For instance, you can add your site insearchenginejourna Friends directory here: http://www.searchenginejournal.org.

That is why Link Popularity is such a wanted value for all webmasters. So the ways of link popularity increase are always researched. However, there are only a couple of ways to get a really good link to your page. For instance you can swap links with this page. Unlike other link swap resources, searchenginejournal friends has classified categories, so you will receive an extremely valuable and relevant link to your page. Another efficient way of getting relevant links is to put a counter on your page. Go to searchenginejournal.org, register and insert counter code in your page – you will receive another valuable link from a category that is relevant to your site’s theme. Moreover, in case if you have a lot of traffic, you will be additionaly ramked in top15 rank receiving one more high PR (Google page rank) link to your page.

The amount of references, their weight, their relevancy are defining the page improtance, e.g. link popularity. Each of search engines gives a toolbar, owing to which you can define the quantity of backward links referring to your page, the amount of indexed pages on your site and so on.

It must be noticed that often the information concerning versions of different search engines is different. It happens for many reasons. For example, Google recently doesn’t show all backward links, maybe for the reason of struggle with link farms. You can see also different data about backwards, if you make queries to Google from different IPs, what is conditioned on the presence of several main search engine databases, which have information dated with different time. More or less adequate you can consider the technical data, which is given by Yahoo, but in any case the truth about backward links lies somewhere in the middle of all the data given by search engines. In our link popularity check service we tried to gather all useful technical queries connected with the concrete page in one place.