Link Popularity is a combined measure of the number and the quality of links that are pointing to your website… In other words, how many other sites considered your site to be important enough to link to it?
1.
Determine who is linking to your competition - OptiLink (
www.optilinksoftware.com ) is a program that will allow you to see which sites are linking to your competitive set. You can also find out who is linking to your competition by going to: Link popularity by Market Sherpa (
www.marketleap.com/publinkpop ) or
www.Linkpopularity.com Once you find out all the releavnt links your competitors sites are securing link from, you can contract owners/webmasters of these sites with the goal of negotiating a link to your site as well.
2.
Secure Quality Links - Use PageRank to determine which sites Google deems "important." Single out relevant sites with the intent to solicit those with a high PageRank. (Note: you need to download the Google Toolbar to enable the PageRank option. You can download the Google Toolbar by going to:
http://toolbar.google.com ).
Focus on choosing your links wisely. Links from authoritative pages are more valuable. Aim to get links from trusted pages. Trusted pages/sites are sites that have already been given a Google PageRank. Try to get links from sites that have Google PageRank of 4 or higher.
3.
Link Dilution - The fewer number of links on the referring page, the better. Link dilution occurs when the referring pages has a significant amount of outgoing links. Do not get link from Link Farms. Remember Google should see Natural Links not Artificial Links
4.
Enroll your site in videly used Search Engines and directories that have presence in the regional and national basis—for example, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, dmoz.org, etc. Most of our(Milestone) website promotion plan include these enrollments.
5.
Relevant Links - Enroll in topic-specific engines and directories on the internet – although this will not produce an immediate impact, the accumulation of these sites can eventually help increase your PageRank.
6.
Consistent One URL - Use the same URL format for all incoming links. You don't want to dilute your PageRanks by having links pointing at several different URL's.
7.
Link Relevancy - Giving other sites your most important key word phrases to link to you. Remember Miserable Failure! Create few line Key Word rich description for your site. While securing links from other site, request other sites to use Key word rich description in the links pointing back to your site.
Goal is to secure links from relevant website with page rank of 4 or above using most popular key words in anchor text (text linking to your URL). This will increase link relevancy and your site will rank high organically for desired key word phrases.
8.
Make sure incoming links do not include the rel="nofollow" attribute within the source code of the link. Google will not give your page credit for having this is present.
9.
Be careful who you link to. Your site can be penalized by linking to "bad" or irrelevant sites.
10.
Write Article/ Press Release and Enroll - If you like to write things related to your inductry which can be valuble for your customers, you can write articles in specific artcile search egines and directroes. You can also write press release about your business (hotel) (only if you have some thing relevant to share with online world), and submit to online destribution services such as PRweb.com
Well written article and Press Release will give you instant links from all the online distribution services which are looking for news, articles etc.
Milestone Internet Marketing, experts in creating complete internet marketing solutions for the lodging and hospitality industry. Please contact Benu at benu@milestoneinternet.com. www.milestoneinternet.com 
