One day I went to Alta Vista to check rankings I had done for a web hosting web site. It contact page had been indexed by the secondary spider along with several other pages. The odd thing was the contact page had not one keyword on it and yet it had ranked in then top ten on that particular search. It had no meta tags and absolutely no relevant keywords on the page. It did have one tiny hyperlink at the bottom that said, "hosting". It seemed bizarre at the time and that was my first tip off to this concept of "off page" criteria.

Let's take brief look link popularity.

Quantity of in coming links- Do other web sites point hyperlinks from their site to yours? If other sites direct traffic yours, this would indicate to the search engines that you site has valuable content.

Quality incoming links - this would quality of the site that links that point to the sites that are linking to you. For example if a very "popular" site, say Microsoft for example had links point at your site, logic would dictate that your site has valuable content and thus boost you relevancy factor.

Out going links - Does your web site point hyperlinks at other sites? If so how many and what is the popularity or quality of the content on that site? If your site directs traffic to other site, especially if they are "popular"

It is also a huge plus if the sites you link to and from have similar content.

The reasoning behind all of this is that if a site with "quality" content links to you, you must have quality content as well. Guilt by association in action.

This might not come as a surprise to you but this concept or the implementation thereof is not new. It has been going on to one degree or another for at least 15 months or so. Point being there is no reason to panic and get your bowels in an uproar. It has only more recently become used to a greater degree and on more search engines.

Who is this going to affect the most and what can you do to take advantage of these changes. Our research shows that more competitive the keyword/phrase, the more these criteria come into play. Highly competitive keyword/phrases such as "web hosting" are affected the most. On such a search, as much as the top 15 to 20 spots or more are affected. Say your keyword/phrase is moderately competitive, It may affect only half as many rankings.

Here is how to tell on your keyword/phrase. Go to the search engines and type in your keyword/phrases and inspect the top 2 or 3 results by doing the following. Take each domain one at a time and inspect its link popularity by doing the following:

Type in the following at Alta Vista: link:xyzcompany.com - host: xyzcompany.com Type in the following at Infoseek: link:xyzcompany.com -site:xyzcompany.com

Where xyzcompany.com is the domain you are evaluating the link popularity of.

This will tell you how many pages point to that domain excluding pages within its own domain. Since Infoseek is a smaller index, it will show fewer links than Alta Vista but this will give you an idea.

Now inspect the links linked to those. Yes it may take a little bit of time but it will tell you exactly how important and what type of link popularity is getting those sites to the top. First you will realize A very large percentage of sites on the Internet are uninspiring in terms of content and design. Next you will find most sites have few if any links pointing to them. You will be surprised how many sites have less than a couple of incoming hyperlinks.

So what do you do to increase your ranking based on link popularity? Begin you efforts to getting quality links to your site. It is not difficult. Set aside time to surf and email sites that may be have similar content and may be willing to trade links. First it will help if you educate your potential link exchange candidates about a little about website promotion. Attach a copy of this article (as long as it is done in its entirety) and ask them to exchange links. If you send out ten emails requesting links you may get 2 or 3 links. Make a goal of having 10 to 20 QUALITY links in the next 30 days. This should send your link popularity factor through the roof. And the nice thing about it is once you are solid in this particular area, you can move on to other endeavors because it is not a variable that the search engines have xxxasa.

Remember what separates first place from second place can be measured in the tiniest of increments. Look at the difference in first second and third place in horse race. Sometimes measured in hundredths of a second. Now tell me a little bit does not make a big difference. There is a war going on. On the search engines, in your chosen keyword/phrase, the difference between a position in the top thirty where it can be found and below could be five or ten hyperlinks. Most people will read this article and then go about business as usual. That means traffic to their site as usual. Don't be one of them. Leave no stone unturned and explore all of the possibilities to make your web site a success. Take the time to learn the ins an outs of the search engines.