The Red Queen once told Alice: “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” While that might be dubious advice in a real life emergency, it’s not a bad strategy to increase link popularity of your Internet site.

If a good offense truly is the best defense, then start your foray with a look at your link popularity rating. Don’t be surprised when you find widely varying results from different search engines. That’s because every search engine has its own computational process, known as an algorithm, that calculates its rankings.

In most cases, however, your link popularity rating is made up of two measures: a mathematical evaluation of the importance of the sites linking to you, and the number of sites that link to yours.

Link importance ranks what kind of external websites link to yours. Link popularity counts up how many sites link to yours. These factors go into the algorithm that creates a link popularity score that’s weighted, rather than a raw count. This weighted ranking came about after search engine designers realized that spammers were skewing the ratings by setting up phony websites to link up with. These days reputable search engines rarely count links that come from free web sites.

Link importance comes in for criticism from time to time, based on the fact that even though it’s computed mathematically, at some point a human makes a subjective judgment as to which sites are “important.” You may have 2, 500 devoted fans who think your film criticism site rocks their world, but unless one of their links is from Entertainment Weekly, you’re not going to increase link popularity.

Faced with this computational reality, there’s lots of spirited debate over the best ways to increase link popularity. However, many online experts suggest that variations of these four techniques have proven the most effective at upping your search engine ranking.

1. Submit your site to human-edited search engine directories such as Yahoo. Com and the Open Directory Project (dmoz. Org). Since both of these directories, along with some others, are maintained by volunteer editors who actually look at your site, getting listed can take some time. However, the reward of getting listed – that link importance factor – can boost your link popularity. If you want faster results, try getting listed with a smaller niche director that’s specific to your content. Use your site’s primary keywords to find these smaller directories via search engines.

3. Trade links with other sites. Choose sites related to your topic which have a high search engine ranking. Be sure to include a paragraph describing your site content to ensure more click-throughs, and ask your new online buddy to do the same.

3. Find highly ranked sites related to your specialty and trade links with them. Remember, they need the links as much as you do. It’s a mutual thing. Assure your click-throughs with short descriptions of your content.

4. Write a testimonial about how much you learned/gained from somebody’s site. Odds are high they’ll ask to lift up your comments, so be sure to request they include a link to your site.

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