In addition to optimising the individual pages of your website, for your targeted keywords, it is absolutely vital that you also improve the Link Popularity of your site, by securing one way links from as many external websites as possible. Ultimately it is your linking strategy that will deliver high rankings on Google and other search engines.

However this is not a simple numbers game, as the quality of your links play a significant role in deciding your ultimate position on Google. With only a small number of high quality One Way Links, it is possible to outrank a website that has many inbound links. If a website has a high volume  of one way links, it does not mean that it will automatically rank highly for every keyword, as Google decides the position of a website in its search results by analysing both on page and off page factors.

On page factors represent elements that are already present on all of your web pages. These “elements” are within your control and can be amended where necessary, in order to make your web pages as search engine friendly as possible. These changes are what is commonly referred to as “Search Engine Optimisation”.

The primary Web Page Optimisation tasks should concentrate on the following:

• Make sure that Title, Description and Keywords Meta Tags are present on each page of your website.
• Make sure that each set of Meta Tags contain unique content, that is relevant to the topic of each page.
• Do not duplicate the content in your Tags across every web page.
• Your Title Tag is the most important, make sure that it contains relevant targeted keywords.
• Make sure that the text on each page is also optimised for your targeted keywords.
• Check that all the relevant page links have been correctly coded, to ensure that search engines can navigate your site correctly and are able to find all your pages.
• Check that the HTML code of your web pages is error free to enable search engine spiders to easily parse your pages?
• Check that your web pages are free of all spam elements and there is no hidden text, no disguised redirects and no keyword stuffing.

Off page factors represent the elements that cannot be found within your web pages and primarily relate to improving the link popularity of your website.

These factors should focus on the followng:

• How many websites link to your site?
• Are these inbound links from related high quality pages?
• Do social bookmark websites link to your website?
• Do the links to each web page contain the relevant, targeted keywords.

All of these factors are important in order to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines.

Why is link popularity important?

If you wish to achieve high rankings on Google for a specific targeted keyword, you must optimise one of your web pages for that keyword. If the web page optimisation has been performed correctly and meets all of the criteria mentioned above, then Google will list it in the search results.

Obviously, there will be many competitive websites, that will be targeting the same keyword as your website. If more than one web page has been optimised for the same keyword, then Google will list the web pages with the best quality inbound links in the highest positions. For example, if 10 websites have been optimised for the keyword “blue widgets” then the website that has the most one way links, that contain the keyword “blue widgets” as part of as the link text, will achieve the best position on Google.

If your website meets all on page requirements and has the right number of quality links (which does not mean that it must have the most links) then you will achieve high search engine rankings. There are many ranking elements that will influence your position in Google’s search results. The more elements that meet Google’s requirements, the more likely it is that your website will be listed on page one of Google’s search results.

If you found this post helpful, why not subscribe to my Blog by RSS Feed or Email and receive free Professional SEO Tips and Market News, direct to your inbox. As ever, feel free to comment on this post.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 22:10 and is filed under Link Popularity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.