What is link popularity? How do you get it? In several ways, none of which are easy. There are no shortcuts to the process of building links. Eric provides credible information about the art of link building, and dispels/debunks the many claims and rumors regading link popularity, especially as it relates to search engine rankings.

Eric Ward founded the Web's first service for announcing and linking Web sites back in 1994, and he still offers those services today. His client list is a who's who of online brands. Ward is best known as the person behind the original linking campaigns for Amazon.com Books, The Link Exchange, Microsoft.com, Rodney Dangerfield, WarnerBros, The Discovery Channel, the AMA, and The Weather Channel. His services won the 1995 Tenagra Award For Internet Marketing Excellence, and he was selected as one of the Web's 100 most influential people by Websight magazine in 1997. Eric also writes the Link Building column for ClickZ, the NetSense column for Ad Age magazine, and is a 4-star speaker for iWORLD, Fawcette, and CNet.

For the right price you think I'll engage in sleazy link building tactics normally only used by gambling or viagra sites? Nope. And it's not because I think I occupy some sort of high moral ground. It's because these tactics make the web experience worse and simply don't work. And the sooner everyone stops being link whores, the better, in my opinion....

The search engines love passive links like this. Why? Because they can trust them....

In their frenzy to build links to curry favor with the engines, web site owners miss a far more important audience using topical tools....

The real question here is do search engines know about this scam yet, or do they count guestbook links as additional links for poplarity rankings?...

I've found that most brand web sites fail to provide the type of content that engenders, inspires, or encourages other sites to link to them, or online editors to write about them. I call this concept 'linkability'. Some sites have a lot of it, others have very little....

Imagine this scenario: Anytime a new link to your site is found, you receive a private email alerting you to it and showing you the exact page where the link to you can be seen. Now imagine this fabulous service not only exists, but also is free. With a little ingenuity, you can create such a service on your own, right now, in five minutes....

There have been several high profile cases where owners of one web site have sued or threatened to sue owners of another web site for linking to them. I know on first glance this sounds crazy, and to be honest, it *IS* crazy. After all, if links are illegal then every search engine, every directory, and every link list is illegal, and would have to be shut down....

Here's a collection of linking related tid bits you should be aware of....

You know you should have more links pointing to your site, but you're not sure what the best approach is to pursue them. One of my favorite approaches is to use the search results for terms that are important for my site....

Did you know you can use Google to identify the sites you need to have links from? Learn how to use Google to evaluate link targets for your site....

Unless the links to your site exist on the first or second directory level of the linking site, they likely won't impact search engine rankings....

Automated link generators are useless. Not because the software behind them is flawed, but because hundreds of novice web marketers are using them indiscriminately....