The number of websites that link to your website is one of the factors that help search engines determine your relevancy for a search term. Link popularity and gaining new links from outside websites to your website have proven to be a popular concept for people seeking to improve their search engine rankings.

What is link popularity and how exactly does it work? Search engines don’t just look at the content of your website to determine if you are a match for a search. They also look at the number of outside websites that can validate, by linking, that you are a good match.

Search engines have also begun to rank the importance of the sites that link to you. This means if the New York Times links to your site, your credibility is higher than if Joe’s Online Newspaper provides a link to your website. Search engines also consider the text contained in the link that is pointing to your website. If the text in the links contains keywords you are trying to compete for, the search engines consider your site to have even greater credibility.

In the early days of search engine optimization, marketers focused on meta-tags as the primary way to attract search engine traffic. Meta-tags are HTML tags that help describe the document they are located within. Today we know that search engines not only look at meta-tags, but a sites content, internal link structure and link popularity.

Meta-tags are still an important tool for successful search engine marketing. Search engines focus on three primary meta-tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular search phrase.

The Title Tag is one of the most important meta-tags for a search engine. The Title Tag should describe exactly what the document contains. It should contain keywords, but not repeats, of terms you hope to be found for. It should also be as readable as possible. You must consider that the Title Tag will be the first thing someone sees if you appear in a search result.

Too often, companies or individuals focus on making sure their company name or proper name appears in every Title Tag on their website. Imagine walking into an immense library that contained millions of books all with the same title. You would go crazy and never find what you were looking for.

The Title Tag should be no longer than 70 characters and should contain words and phrases that accurately describe the content of a page. Try to make the Title Tags located throughout your site unique and relevant. Every word in the Title should be contained somewhere in the page they are used for. Research has also shown that a call to action will usually produce more clicks than a basic description.

Search engines and directories provide a free submissions page where you can submit your website and a few pages of your website to be included in their results. Marketleap recommends that you read the search engine’s submission guidelines and not submit your website unnecessarily or excessively.

If your site contains quality content, is relevant to searchers, and has a solid linking structure, you could be included in these search engines within six to ten weeks. None of these free submission pages guarantees that your site will be included. If you do not show up within eight to ten weeks, you can resubmit your website again.

If you are creating a website or working on a site you’ve already created, the content of the site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine marketing. The pages you create should provide valuable information that references very specific terms and concepts that are unique to your website.

Text is one part of the content that is important for being found in search engines. Search engines usually read and index the first 500 words from each page they successfully crawl. The text within that span of words is one factor that helps to determine your relevance for a particular search term.

If you are successful at weaving your keywords into compelling copy (remember humans are your primary reader) you are more likely to be relevant for keyword searches. Once your site has been up and running for three months, run a report on your log files to determine what keywords people are using to find your site.

You might be surprised if the most popular keywords that do find your site don’t match up to keywords you already had in mind and were using. The web is a great educator about how to succeed. Your site might be very popular for search terms that you hadn’t thought of when you built it.