In this days search engine rankings have become one of the most important issues for a website. Because of that the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN frequently update their algorithms in order to deliver best results to their users. The most important factor in a search engine's ranking algorithm is link popularity.

Link popularity is defined as the number of links that point to a site. The search engines consider this links as some kind of votes in the sites favor. Some time ago it didn't matter what kind of links pointed to your site. So every webmaster linked their sites to any other site not considering it's nature. Link exchange was the best website marketing strategies in those times. But now, the search engines updated their algos and they investigate every "vote".

Link popularity remains a major factor in the search engine's way of ranking but what's more important this days is the quality of the links. When the search engine spider crawls, it investigates all the incoming links to see if they are good "votes" or bad "votes". When everybody was making reciprocal links only the number was important. But this reciprocal links are not so powerful any more because search engines are looking for links on related sites with related content that are not placed their just for receiving a link back. The spider wants to find out if that link is placed there because of the quality of the site is pointing to.

So increasing your link popularity is still the best website marketing strategy but try to get only good links from related sites. This way you'll benefit from the direct targeted traffic and you'll have good search engine positioning too.

There are many ways to get quality links. The best would be acquiring one way links. If the inbound links are one way then the search engine will know from the beginning that the links are not a result of an agreement between two webmasters. You can achieve one way links by writing good articles and distribute them for reprinting over the net, having great content on your site, writing testimonials for products that you used or even purchasing them. Reciprocal links are still good but try to trade your links only with sites with similar topics and trust worthy sites.

In conclusion increasing your link popularity with good legit links will boost your site's traffic in no time.