Link popularity is a factor that many search engines use when ranking web pages within their indexes. Simply put, most search engines give a ranking boost to sites that have incoming links from quality, related sites. This method of establishing importance, pioneered by the increasingly popular Google, is now used in some form by 19 of the top 20 search engines. While it is still possible to achieve high rankings for non-competitive terms without a great deal of link popularity, it is unlikely your site will rank well for very popular terms without it.

Links are a great free way to increase traffic flow to your site. Some sites get as much as 200,000 visitors a month from links. Remember, this is Free traffic. There are more benefits, as we will discuss later. First though, how do you get a link to your site?

Look for other sites that might link to yours. Ideally, the businesses that run these sites will be related to yours but will not be direct competitors. For example, if you had a site that sold supplies for swimming pools, it could be useful to your visitors if your site had a link to a swimming pool installer, and useful to his visitors to have a link back to your site. Since your offerings complement each other, neither of you are likely to lose business by exchanging links. When you have found a good number of sites, add a link to each of them from a "links" page on your own site. It is important to do this before contacting the site owners, as they are much more likely to reciprocate if they see that you have already taken the trouble to link to them.

How do you find sites to swap links with?

Going to http://www.linkpopularity.com and typing in a well-known competitor's website is one of the best ways. Check who is linking back to him. Then contact the same sites for links to you. This saves a lot of time surfing the web for appropriate websites to link to your business. For example if you sell Herbalife products. Put http://www.herbalife.com in linkpopularity. This will give all the websites linking to Herbalife. Now contact each one of those websites for a link to your website. SIMPLE!