The Importance Of Links To Your Website.

To best explain website popularity and it’s relevance to your web page, lets start with a quick example:

Let’s say that you are approached by a friend asking your advice about the best place to buy golden widgets.

Now, as a person of some knowledge, you happen to know that there are many widget specialists around, many of whom sell golden widgets – but what you don’t necessarily know is the best place for your friend to shop.

You’ve never needed to use a golden widget yourself – let alone buy one and, as far as you know, one golden widget shop is as good as the next.

One thing you do know for sure is that there’s a particular supplier of golden widgets across town where it seems a lot of people go to shop … and you also know that there are some very important people around town, people who know more about such things, that speak very highly of that particular store.

So it would be quite natural then to tell your friend that there is an abundance of widget shops, many of whom stock the golden variety … but there’s this one particular store that is regularly frequented by some of the most highly respected “widgeteurs”.

Your friend would be grateful for this advice.

The internet is the same in that when someone searches for golden widgets, the search engine aims to present it’s user with recommendations on the same basis as you would.

The search engine database is overwflowing with addresses of websites that are related to widgets and, more specifically golden widgets. Some websites appear to the search engine to specialise in them exclusively.

But, in determining which order to display it’s recommendations, the search engine needs to consider which are more popular than others – particularly those who are being recommended by other well-respected, popular websites.

How do they do this?

Well, their robots follow the links to and from your web pages, they count how many there are, they look at the relevance of those sites that link to you and they look in turn at the popularity of those sites,.

Google, for example, keeps this type of information about your website (and every page within it) on its database and makes it available for everyone to see. They call it Google “pagerank” and if you have a google toolbar in your internet browser you can instantly see the pagerank of every web page that you visit.

As a side note, I highly recommend that you download the Google toolbar as soon as you’ve finished reading this article if you don’t already have one – it is absolutely free and will be very handy for you in seeking out potential “popular” linking partners as well as measuring the progress of your own websites’ pagerank.

In short, for your website to get maximum exposure it not only needs to be relevant to the search terms used, it needs to have as many important websites linking to it as possible.

But not all at once!

Just like you, a search engine would prefer to recommend the golden widget merchant that has become consistently more popular over time than one who has just arrived in town with instant popularity … probably because this is an indication that the popularity may have been artificially induced – as opposed to popularity that has been earned by reputation over time.

How do you achieve this? Gradually, systematically and also with a bit of help. As I have stated in previous posts I use a simple free automated system to distribute my articles (including this one) and in turn gain valuable backlinks to my websites, which increases my sites page rank in the search engines. One of the benefits of the system is that articles are released gradually over a number of days so that the web is not flooded with links to your site all at once. Have a look at Free Traffic System. Its free and I recommend it.

Grab important advice about website traffic – go through this page. The time has come when concise information is truly within your reach, use this chance.