Ever wondered how popular your site is and how your site compares with other sites on the net? The following resources are intended to help you assess just popular your web site is (or its ranking):

• Compare your visitor numbers with other sites (click popularity)
• Discover who is linking to you (link popularity)
• How to improve your link popularity
• Other Resources

One obvious measure of popularity is how many visitors your web site gets. If you don't already have a web site tracker then there are a number of free and commercial ones available. For a comprehensive list of free and commercial web site trackers take a look at www.cryer.co.uk/resources/websitetracking.htm. Web site tracking will tell you how many visitors your web site gets, but won't of itself allow you to compare your popularity (or ranking) with other sites.

Compare your visitor numbers with other sites

Some "service providers" keep a track of the number of times their service (or one of their services) has been either been displayed on your web site or has referred visitors to your "target" web site. These services are then able to give a comparative ranking for a site against other sites based on their own usage. Results can therefore be used as a general guide or indication but should not be treated as 100% reliable.

Some search engines record the number of people who clicked through to your web site. In this way they are able to provide a ranking of how frequently a site is visited, however I do not know of any that make this information public.

Discover who is linking to you

There are a number of sites that given a web site address will return you with the number of other sites on the internet contain a link to your web site. These work by interrogating search engines to obtain the number of pages in their indexes which link to your site. Most of these in turn will then allow you to track back to the search engine to list all of those pages:

Link	Search Engines	Max URLs	Reports by e-mail	Comments
www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/link-popularity.html	Google, Yahoo, Live, AllTheWeb and AltaVista.	3	Yes	By way of comparison it shows the ranking of your site against those of 20 of sites of increasing popularity.
www.uptimebot.com	Google, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Hotbot MSN, Teama, Dmoz	1 / ?	Yes	Once you register with the site (which is free) you can compare the link counts for multiple sites. Unclear what the limit is on the number of sites, but is quite high.
www.addme.com/popularity.htm	Ask, Yahoo, Google, AllTheWeb and AltaVista.	1	No
http://watson.addy.com	?	1	No	Provides other checks for a web page. Link popularity is not its main focus.
www.linkpopularity.com	Google, MSN, Yahoo	1	Yes	This site provides links to Google, MSN and Yahoo which will give you the popularity information, but the results are not correlated on this site.
www.trafficzap.com/linkpopularity.php	Google, MSN, Yahoo	1	No
www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/link-popularity/	Google, Yahoo and Bing	1	No	Results open in a pop-up window.
www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-popularity-checker.shtml	Google, Altavista, MSN, AllTheWeb and Yahoo	1	No
http://www.iconinteractive.com/tools/pop/	AllTheWeb, Bloglines, AltaVista, Google, HotBot, MSN and Yahoo.	1	No

In addition to the above some sites offer software that performs a very similar function. The above list is intentionally restricted to those sites offering an on-line indication of site ranking and does not include downloadable software solutions.

What can be a little disconcerting is that these resources can return different results for a given page for the same search engine. Sometimes this can be explained away by one service requesting links to the specific page whereas another might be for any pages belonging to your website. It may also be that they use different regional versions of the same search engine.

How to improve your link popularity

The only way to improve your link popularity (i.e. the number of inbound links to your site from other people's sites) is to get other sites to link to you. Ideas to consider:

1. Contact similar sites and ask if they would be willing to exchange links with you - you add a link to them in return for them adding a link to your site.
2. If there are any relevant web directories then submit your site to them. One popular directory is the Open Directory Project - www.dmoz.org.
3. Some sites now sell links (but be aware that Google is reported to disapprove of this):
   • www.buyselllinks.com - Provides a means to buy and sell text links from other webmasters. It is useful for webmasters looking for a page-rank/link-popularity boost or for webmasters looking for an alternative revenue stream.
4. Some sites specialise in finding sites to exchange links with.
   For example:
   • www.reciprocallinkup.com - site specifically designed for webmasters who are interested in reciprocal link trading, increasing link popularity and improving web site exposure.

If you might also find the following SEO tip useful: www.cryer.co.uk/resources/seo/seo_tip_8.htm, as it covers the above and more.

Other Resources

• http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/popularity.html - article on discovering how people are finding your site by examining the server's logs.