Link popularity and link quality can be viewed as the yin and yang of offpage search engine optimization.  While not necessary opposing factors, they are absolutely complementary.  So, what is your weapon of choice when it comes to improving offpage SEO factors?   Should it be a sniper approach that is targeted on focused results?  Or, can you blast it with a shotgun and hope for the best?  This author packs his sniper rifle when optimizing offpage SEO factors and so should you.  Read on to learn about these two offpage SEO factors and why your website promotion focus should be targeted. 

Offpage search engine optimization refers to factors that are not on your web site that impact your search engine ranking and the amount of traffic you receive.  Believe it or not, offpage optimization ultimately decides whether you appear on page one in the search engines or on page one hundred.  Offpage SEO factors include which sites link to you, the number of sites that link to you, the significance of the web sites that link to you, the anchor text of the link pointing to your web site, the number and significance of the sites that point to the site that links to you and the number of outbound links on the site that is linking to you.  Of these offpage factors, the two most important are link popularity and link quality.  Focus your energy on these two factors for the best results.

Link Popularity
Simply stated, link popularity is the number of links that point to your web site.   Search engines count each link as a vote for your site.  Some votes are considered more important than others, but we will come back to that in a moment.  You can have the best site on the internet with hundreds of pages of unique content, but if you have limited link popularity nobody will find your website.  Bottom line, to improve your rankings in the search engines you need to increase the number of links pointing to your website.  To do this right, you should focus on building links from authority web sites that are related to your content - slowly.  You do this by link exchange programs, buying one-way text links, through article marketing or by posting your link in blogs, newsletters or forums.  Just be careful and use each of these techniques sparingly and intelligently.  Search engines are very sophisticated and frown on abusive attempts to inflate link popularity.  Inbound links appearing too fast - especially from unrelated websites – can drop your ranking or get you banned completely.

Link Quality
While link popularity is important, link quality is even more important.  Simply stated, link quality is the reputation of the site linking to you.  This reputation includes the significance, relevance, keyword density, anchor text and several other factors of the referrer.    The remainder of this article will focus on these key elements of building link quality.

• Significance - Your link building efforts should focus on getting links from sites that are significant.  Significance refers to the prominence, presence or the authority of the referrer.   Some think of this it terms of page rank, but page rank is an outdated and unreliable measure.  Page rank has little to do with rankings these days.   For almost any keyword combination, you can find high ranking sites that have low page rank.  If you are looking for links from significant or authoritative sites, try to get a link from sites that rank high for your related keyword phrases.  You can do this by focusing initially on the top ten to twenty sites in each search engine for your keyword phrases.   Try to get a link from each of those sites.   

• Relevance – You want your link on pages where the theme is related to your website.  This is critical.  You are wasting your time if you try to do link exchanges with site that are not related to your theme.  Links from unrelated websites have little value.  As noted above, focus your link building on the top ranking sites for your keyword phrases and other themes related to your website.  Focus your link building efforts on highly relevant and authoritative websites.   A handful of these links weigh considerably more than hundreds of links from unrelated insignificant websites.  Here is where you want the sniper rifle - target significant and relevant websites. 
• Keyword Density - The ratio of your keywords on a page when compared to the total number of words on the page.  The optimum keyword density is between three and eight percent.  Focus your efforts on websites with appropriate keyword density.  Sites and web site pages that overuse or abuse your keyword phrases should be avoided. 
• Anchor Text - The anchor text refers to the visible hyperlinked text on the referrer’s page.  The anchor text used in your link should be relevant to the content of the web page linking to you.  It should also contain your important keyword phrase.    Put some extra thought into constructing multiple variations of the title and description of the links pointing to you.   Avoid overuse of your primary keyword phrases.  Choose your anchor text wisely.  Having hundreds of links using the same anchor text may seem like it will increase your ranking for the terms used in the anchor text, but there is a point where overuse negatively affects your ranking.  Search engines view this overuse as spamming. Vary the phrases in your anchor text to use themes related to your keywords and phrases. In the eyes of the search engine algorithms, these phrases relate to your theme and will positively impact your search engine ranking for all of the keywords and phrases used in the anchor text. 

Optimizing offpage factors is fundamental to boosting search engine rankings.   You need to boost your link popularity, but be sure to focus building links high quality relevant sites.   This will maximize your efforts and help avoid getting penalized from the search engines.   To help with your optimization efforts, be sure to check out SEO Elite and iBusinessPromoter.   Both tools will will have a phenomenal impact on improving your link popularity and link quality.