Link popularity used to be the most important factor in driving search engine results placement.  The number of 3^rd party sites you had linking to your site was seen by the search engine algorithms to be a good measure of how relevant and important your content was.  Search engine algorithms will look at 3rd party sites linking to you and if they are good sites that are linking to you then they will consider your sight to have interesting and useful content and will increase your rankings on the search engine results page. 

From a search engine optimization standpoint link popularity has some importance it doesn’t have the importance it did three to four years ago but simply speaking it is important to have 3^rd party links to your site because they are touch points to access your site.  People find your website from search, typing it in direct, or links out there from 3^rd party sites.  Therefore the more links you have out there on the Internet with links to your site, the more touch points there are out there.  Having many 3^rd party sites out there with links for your site is that it creates traffic for your site.  Increased traffic itself will help to enhance your search engine results placement. 

If your site has 1000 visitors a month now and in 6 months it has 10000 visitors a month the search engine results placement will significantly increase.  This happens because the algorithms look at that change by tracking and measuring the number of visitors to that site themselves. Through that tracking they say can see that something must of happened to make it more valuable and they will boost your rankings.

 It is unsure to what degree that will help your rankings but the more traffic you get the higher you move in the search rankings which helps you get more traffic which helps you get more links which helps you move up and so it’s a cycle.  There are a lot of sites, industry websites that will help you by putting links back to your site such as the chamber of commerce.  Avoid getting links from websites that reflect badly on you such as Spam sites and porn sites as the algorithms will punish you for that.

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