One popular topic among webmasters on the internet is site popularity. No doubt, you have seen tons of ads offering you to "get to number one on Google or Yahoo" or offering to mass submit your site to hundreds if not thousands of search engines and directories and such. These are not smart ways to win popularity for your site and may even get you branded as a spammer in many places online. There are much more better and efficient ways to promote your site and build a good traffic following.

First, get yourself some tools. A good keyword tool such as Good Keywords or Wordtracker is a must if you want to win at the search engine game. Invest what you need to get one of these and give it a good workout whenever you start optimizing web pages. Another tool I use is the Alexa website so I know how much traffic is coming to my site versus my competition. Google offers a great keyword tool from its Adwords program that you can gauge how much traffic keywords you have selected stack up as far as attracting search traffic and how much competition you can expect for a keyword.

You want to get in the habit of building links to your site from other webmasters or sites that are relevant to yours. Doing this efficiently is a trick but niche directories are a good way to start the process. You can find these by doing a search in the major search directories using your keywords plus the term "directory" or "niche directory". Once you have located a number of directories, you can submit your site (some will let you submit pages as well). If the directory has a lot of traffic coming to it (you can use Alexa to check this) you may want to consider getting a paid listing. These generally run from $15 to $30 dollars a year for the ad and can be beneficial to helping you make a permanent home in the higher rankings on the major search engines.

Making forum posts and blog posts linked to pages on your site also gets you more play from the major search engines. They see this as fresh contest and often reward you for these links. Having a blog within your domain is a big plus and is a highly recommended move if you can manage it well.

Getting articles from other authors for visitors to your site can be an asset. I usually place these in a newsletter that is accessible from the main pages of my site so readers can browse through them. They also count as a plus when the spiders come from the search engines and this just gives my site popularity a boost in the fresh content category. ((Once you get the hang of it, you will come up with your own means of improving your site popularity by building content and promoting out in the internet arena where your audience can find you. While it is not hard, it is a continuous process and you need to work at it to stay competitive.