A major achievement in gaining page rank on search engines involves link popularity. All the main search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN consider this the single most important factor. The general belief and strategy they use is that when a website is important, then other websites will link to it as a major resource for their visitors.

A relatively important website that has a high number of important incoming links should be ranked higher than its competing websites. Webmasters work to achieve high rank with link popularity. Many websites are devoid of quality content and they get very few links because of it.

The rank of a particular website cannot be based solely on the number of incoming links. It would be easy to gain numerous back links to any website through link exchange. The quality of the sites that link back must be a consideration as well.

In the best situation links can be gotten from ranked websites with good traffic, especially from pages with fewer external links. If a website’s incoming links are all pointing to the home page and use the same keywords and same descriptions, and its links come from reciprocal links pages, then search engines see the links were made only to achieve page rank.

Here are the best ways to establish incoming links from higher ranked websites:

1) Speak out in forums and write in your link with your signature.

2) Exchange links with websites who write on the same content that you write. Be careful about which page they add your website link. Your link should not be included with more than 20 to 30 other links. And make sure it is not just added to a link page. The page’s title and other links that appear there
should relate to your website’s content. Having a reciprocal link from a “Links” page counts for very little.

3) Write quality content about your field as well as your products and services.

4) Market articles that bear good content. Ask other webmasters to post your articles too.

5) Add your website to the most popular web directories that will accept it, especially if they are directories that specialize in your content areas.

6) Do not concentrate on a single method, you need to use all of them for maximal effect. Any website that has only reciprocal links doesn’t appear normal to Google. A combination of reciprocal and one way links is the best way to be seen as normal.

Arthur Browning began his career teaching technical writing in a small midwestern university for 15 years. He later editted and published a national professional journal for some ten years. He is now an investor. His interests include art collecting, web marketing, writing.