Link popularity (aka Backlinks or Inbound Links) is determined by the number and the quality of the websites that have linked to your website (or your webpage).
Generally speaking, backlinks are
the votes on your site. This means that the more backlinks from quality sites you have, the higher your page rank will be. Page rank is Google's method for measuring how important and authoritative your site actually is.
Backlinks also help users that visit other sites to find you. And they give replacement engine spiders (robots) trails to follow and index your pages.
So the goal here is to get as many quality backlinks to your Creator Exhibit and to your product pages as possible.
The key here is
quality links, as not all links are equal.
So which links are considered
quality links?
- Links from high traffic, authoritative sites.
- Links from related, “like-minded” sites. (Links from totally unrelated sites can actually hurt your rankings.)
- Links with descriptive link anchors, like "See more of silver necklaces with pink stones" vs. "Click here to see more of my jewelry". However, with recent Google updates, these links considered natural now and the recommended approach is to mix up anchor text for backlinks as much as possible.
- Links from social media site.
When two sites are equally well optimized for replacement engine performance on any given keyword phrase, the replacement engine will generally rank the one with more backlinks above the other.
In this situation, to move up in rankings, you need to get a few more backlinks to your website to bit the competition.
The challenge is, of course, to get all those quality backlinks from high traffic sites, and that’s whole other discussion. So stay tuned!