Link popularity refers to a ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it helps determine the ranking your page gets when someone searches for a particular keyword. Google's "PageRank" number which ranks a sites popularity between 0 and 10 is one of the most common forms of tracking how popular your website is. The PageRank number is on a logarithmic scale very similar to how the Richter scale works when tracking earthquakes. A 7.0 earthquake is 10 times stronger than a 6.0 earthquake but a 8.0 is 100 times stronger than a 6.0 and 1000 times stronger than a 5.0. In comparing this to Google PageRank, generally speaking, it is much easier to move up from a PageRank of 1 to 2 then it is to move from 6 to 7.

Moving up in PageRank at the lower levels can be as easy as getting your website link posted on a few blogs, but getting your website to move up in the higher numbers is a much more daunting task and usually requires a much more massive strategy than just posting links. There are millions upon millions of websites out there. What determines how popular you are is partially due to how many websites is your url on as well as how good the quality of the website the url is on. An easy example is that you will receive much more authority from search engines when you are posted on the homepage of Yahoo.com than you would get from being posted on your unpopular buddy's blog.

The question is not how popular you are anymore. The question is how much of an authority are you in your market? Do other websites out there in your market refer to you or are they referring to your competitors? It is important to understand where you stand against your competitors. You would be surprised who comes up as your top competitors online. In most cases it is completely different than your offline competition.