Link popularity is the total number of web sites that link to your web site on the internet. It is not only a measure of the quantity but the quality of links that are directed towards your web site. The search engines are busy at work crawling the web and when they catch your web site by following a link from another web site they quickly judge your site based on that incoming link. It is the way search engines evaluate quality content. It is also a big way that many search engines will rank your site.

Take for instance, Google. They have the Google Page Rank System which assigns a ranking (1-10) that often determines your placement in their search results. Keep in mind that the Google PageRank is only one of the over 100 criteria that Google uses to evaluate your web site. Having high quantity and quantity links is essential to boosting your Page Rank. Not all incoming links to your site are equal so keep that in mind when trading links with another web site.

Here are some quick tips for increasing your web sites link popularity.

- Write articles and submit them to ezine article directories. Dont forget to put a short half paragraph about yourself, your services, and most importantly a link back to your web site. Most off all, do not forget to use your keywords in your link back to your web site. Just take out Notepad or Word and start typing away and save your 1-3 page articles in a folder. Write articles about content that relates to your expertise and the industry or business you are in. Submit them to Go Articles, Ezine Articles, Elib Articles, ISnare, Jogena, and Article 99.

-When getting incoming links by emailing other web masters, developing a blog, or posting in a forum you must never use an image to link back to your site. Always use a text link with your keywords.

- Make sure all of the sections of your web site are accessible on your main page. This will help all of your pages get indexed as well and transfer your main pages popularity ranking to the sub pages.

- Get your website listed in a major directory such as Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ Open Directory Project.

- Create tools and content rich resources with embedded links then submit them everywhere you can.

- Do not link to web sites that have a lot of poor quality links coming into them. Web sites that you link to are link friends. Your friends are who you are and if your friends hang with a bad crowd of link farmers then your sites ranking will suffer.

- Never participate in link exchange, link farms, of banner exchange programs. The search engines despise these sites and will ban them.

- Use anchor text with your sites keywords that point to your site and within your site.

- Always try to get incoming links from web sites with high Page Rank. In addition, the sites the are incoming to yours and the links outgoing should always be of related content to your own site. Related links will boost your popularity as search engines will see your site as even more relevant than it was before.

- Incoming links to your site should not be less than 6 months old. This is because major search engines have not yet properly recognized these young sites yet. In a nutshell, they arent even counted.

- Never get an incoming link from a web site with more than 100 outgoing links. The less outgoing links on other web sites that link to yours the better.