Have you ever watched any television shows or movies which featured the “in” crowd in high school? If so, I hope you paid attention, because link building has many parallels to high school. The whole reason that website owners engage in link building is to make their website appear more popular, thus more relevant to the users of search engines.

All search engines want to provide their users with what they believe is the most relevant content and popularity equals relevancy. If you have a website on green widgets and your website gets a link from a very popular website about green widgets which gets visitors each month, well then your website about green widgets must be relevant as well.

See the connection between link building and high school? If the popular kids like you, then others will see you as popular as well. The crowd you hang out with determines your popularity both in high school and in link building. The opposite is true too. Hang out with a bad crowd, or get links from spammy websites, and you are viewed as being just like them.

When link building, remember that popularity is basically the number of websites that link to yours, and the quality of the websites that are linking to you. If you chose links as if you were choosing friends, you should get some good links.