Link Popularity Index
Our GoGetIt! bot calculates your Link Popularity Index (LPI). LPI is a reliable measure of how "link-popular" your site is, on a scale of 1 to 100, using its own proprietary technology. GoGetIt! reports that number on this tool page.
To calculate your LPI, click on click here to update it. Use that same link to update your LPI whenever you want.
VE compares your site's inbound-link numbers with the number for a "gold standard" content-based Web site. We chose CNN.com as that gold standard content site and assigned its sum of all corrected inbound links a value of 100. The key to a gold standard is that its inbound link totals are so huge that they are basically a "constant" compared to small business sites.
SBI!'s LPI works like a Richter scale. Each drop in 10 points (ex., down to 90), means that you have 1/10 of the corrected total of CNN's inbound links. A score of 80 means that you have 1/100th. And so forth.
A score of 50 means that you have one hundred-thousandth, and you know what? That's an excellent score for a small site (Nori's site, anguilla-beaches.com, scores in the low 50's).
This is a good goal to aim for if you have a fairly broad niche (less if your niche is narrow). You don't have to get it all at once. And you should diversify links over many sources, as explained in DAY 7 of the Action Guide, the Make Your Links Work! e-book, and in the 5 parts of the Building a Links Program section that covers this topic well in the TNT HQ. What about the other end of the spectrum, the low end?
A Link Popularity Index score of 10 means you're on the map, but you should work on getting a bunch more links, using methods discussed ind the Action Guide and TNT HQ (see above) and in Make Your Links WORK!. If you haven't read it, you can download it here (right-click to download).
A score of 20 or more means that you likely have the ball rolling (at least for long tail keywords). Keep link-building as a priority (keep your eyes open for low-hanging fruit that are also quality links as you review all the techniques in the resources mentioned above).
A score of 30 should start bringing in traffic for some TIER 3 pages from long tail keyword searches.
And a score of 40 is getting pretty darn good, with some TIER 2s ranking.
While a score of 50 is your ultimate goal, that's for broader sites.
The right LinkPop? If your site is narrower, if you're getting good rankings on TIER 2s and even your home page with a LinkPop of 35, say, you're likely at the right level for your site.
No single rule fits all. If you have a bunch of pages that rank in the 20s or 30s or 40s on the Search Engine results pages, you're close. A few more links, and specifically deep links to the pages that aren't in the Top 10, may make the difference.
But remember one thing... the Web is getting bigger. Your absolute number of links needs to increase to maintain its LinkPop over the years. Good content should deliver many of those links with no efforts. But still, always keep your eyes open for link opportunities, especially deep links to specific pages that don't rank yet at the engines.
In a nutshell...
VE's Link Popularity Index uses a logarithmic calculation that measures link quantity and especially quality. Use it to assess both the priority of link-building efforts, and the ability of your site's great content to garner inbound links on its own.
Once you build content and links, and traffic starts to grow, you'll notice that links start to grow on their own. For example, most sites on the SBI! Top 1% Results page have extremely high numbers of inbound links. But they started just like you... with good content and some inbound links...
As traffic and content and links grow, inbound links start to take on a life of their own. Visitors give you more links, which increases your traffic. Keep adding great content (add even more with Content 2.0). You get more traffic, and that brings yet more links.
Always keep your eyes open for link opportunities, of course, and especially for deep linking. But once your snowball really starts to gather momentum, your site's visitors start to build your links for you (the better it is, the happier they are to give you a link or talk about you in forums, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Remember...
Those Top 1% SBIers started just like you. But most of the thousands of links to those Top 1% SBI! sites were given to them by visitors, not chased after. You don't need to get thousands of links. Do it right and you'll end up earning most of them without even trying (that said, always keep your eyes open, especially for deep links when just one quality link can make a difference to a page).
But when you first start... build a quality inbound links program to get things rolling.
Diversifying Your Inbound Links
Ken wrote a forum post on an effective method of gaining deep links (links to TIER 2 and TIER 3 pages). You can read it here...
http://forums.sitesell.com/viewtopic.php?t=121298
A follow-up post discusses diversifying the sources of inbound links, and focusing on gaining quality links over a larger number of links. You can read the follow-up here...
http://forums.sitesell.com/viewtopic.php?p=669416#669416
Use Search It! (the Back Links category) to see all the links to your site. If you see that most of your links are "Yahoo! Answers" or "easy directories," you are not diversified and you have too many lower-quality links. Spread your efforts among the sources listed in the Link-Building Checklist found in the TNT HQ.