Link popularity is also known as link building, link exchanging, inbound links etc. It refers to the quality and quantity of incoming links to your site. It is a very important part of the search engine optimization process and plays an important role for getting high search engine rankings on specific keywords.

It is not enough to go for quantity of inbound links when building high link popularity. The quality of inbound links is much more important than quantity for getting that high link popularity. In other words, having a lower number of quality inbound links is more valuable than having a large quantity of poor links in for SEO.

Generally there are three types of link exchanging - one way link, reciprocal link and triangular. One way linking is the process of getting inbound links without having to give a link back. Free directory submission, article submission, blogs, and forums are the best sources of getting one way links to your sites. Reciprocal linking is the process of both giving and receiving a link. In a reciprocal link exchange, you put your link partner's link on a page within your web site, and in return, your link partner will also link to you from his or her web site.

One-way links are more valuable in terms of page rank than reciprocal links, but it is very hard to get one-way links from web sites with a high Google Page Rank. Although directory submission is the easiest way to get one-way links, they do not hold the kind of value as receiving a one-way link from a site with a high Page Rank. The reason for this mostly has to do with the fact that in order to submit your web site to a category that is relevant to your site's contents, you have to bury your link more than 2 categories deep in the directory. For example, if you have "USA based SEO sites", you would submit your site in: main/ computer/ internet/ word wide web / SEO/ USA. This means your link is not indexed until after 5 clicks from the directory's main page. The further away your link is from the directory's main page, the harder it will be for search engine spiders to crawl and index it. This drawback is not experienced with reciprocal link exchanging though, which is the reason most webmasters generally suggest reciprocal link exchanges in addition to one-way link exchange.

It is important to consider some basic things during reciprocal link exchanging in order to truly capitalize on the potential benefits. The following are some tips to consider when it comes to reciprocal link exchanging:

1) Link exchanging must be between relevant sites. Link exchange between non related sites might negatively affect the ranking of your websites in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)

2) Avoid triangular, or 3- way link exchanges.

3) Link pages should not be more than 2 clicks from the site's index page.

4 ) The reciprocating page must be indexed in Google as well as other search engines.

5) Pay careful consideration to the meta tags of your links page. The links page should have proper meta tags and must be related to the your site's keywords.

6) Use appropriate anchor text with relevant keywords when exchanging links with other sites.

7) Also check "no index, no follow" tag on the reciprocating page's meta tags. If you find such this type of tag being used in the meta tags, then avoid exchanging links with those sites.

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