Link popularity refers to the number of links pointing to and from related sites and is an extremely important method of improving your site's relevancy in search engines.

There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your site; internal, incoming and, to a lesser extent, outgoing links.

Let's take a look at each one in more detail.

Internal links

Internal links are amount of links to and from pages in a site. Cross-linking your important related pages is recommended for a better search engine visibility. This assists search engine spiders to find and index your most key pages faster, particularly if some pages are hidden deep within your site.

Site maps

Site maps or sitemap are visual models of your site's content that enables users to find exact content or page on your website. Site maps are like interactive table of contents, with links leading to most or all the pages on your website. Site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the site's information into progressively more specific subject areas.

Incoming links

Incoming link popularity refers to links pointing to a site from other related sites. In addition, there are two types of incoming links:

1. Linking from your own sites

Crass linking as we discussed above is very much recommended for a better crawl of your site by spiders. You must select keywords that describe the site you're linking to. You have to do this because some of the major search engines, such as Google, place a great importance on the text used within, and close to, links.

2. Linking through other sites

There are two ways of finding sites to link to yours. The best way to get other sites to link to yours is to ask them politely. And the best way to find likely candidates is to ask web sites that link to your competition.

To find out which sites are linking to your a particular competitor, visit a search engine such as Google and enter, "link:" followed by the competitors domain name (with and without "www").

For example:

Link:google

link:www.yahoo

To check the link popularity of your own sites, simply use your own domain name.

Once you got the list of related sites, add a link to these on your site. Follow it by sending an email to each web site owner acquainting them that you have linked to their website and request them for a link back to your site.

Another important way to find list of sites that accept site submissions. To find such sites, visit a search engine, such as Google, and search for:

"add url" "your keywords"

Quotation marks are must as it ensures the search engine only return pages with the exact search phrases you search for. Also try replacing, "add url" with one of the following sets of search phrases:

add site, add link, submit url, submit site, submit link

Outgoing links

Outgoing links refers to links pointing to other related sites from your site. Search engine spiders will crawl your site's outgoing links and determine that the content of the sites you link to are related to the content of your own site.

Link keywords

It is important to name your internal and outgoing links carefully. Since keywords play a major part in determining the relevancy of a Web page, it is essential that they are also included in link text.

Link quality

The quality of the links is just as important, if not more, than the number of links to your site.The types of sites you should concentrate on getting links from include major search engines (Google), popular search portals (MSN), web directories (Yahoo.com and Open Directory Project - dmoz), high trafficked sites (eBay.com and Amazon), news sites (CNN), and sites related to your site's theme.

The most important link building strategies includes:

Marketplace understanding

First try to understand your marketplace. Make a list of all the market sectors you service, ranking them in terms of their importance. Choose a minimum of 3-4 niches and make a list of 250 websites under each niches. Go for link exchange only after this list is complete.

Content is king...

Content is what your potential customers will look for. It is content that will give your search engine rankings and would also help in getting links. There is no substitute for a good content, so unavoidable.

Content and proper optimization

Make sure the contents on your website is optimized properly with proper focus on keywords and nice heading, title and description. If you lack time then better hire someone to do the same.

Online press releases

Issuing online press releases is more of a one-to-many approach. You submit your release to a newswire and they distribute your news to thousands of journalists and editors on their database. Such releases can be picked up and covered by both national and local media and are certainly worth. Try Prweb or in the UK, Sourcewire.

But perhaps the best way of getting media coverage quickly is to use the knowledge, experience and contacts collected by others. Eric Ward's URLWire service is the best.. Through many years of online promotion for clients, Ward has built an impressive opt-in list of over 19,000 journalists, website reviewers and writers.

Monitor and evaluate

At the start of this article, I said that link building was not about the number of links you could get. Likewise monitoring and evaluating is not simply a matter of counting how many links you manage to get. What is really worth measuring is the benefit those links bring your business.

So as a minimum you should measure:

* How much increased traffic comes from links

* Which links bring the most traffic

* How much does your search engine traffic

* How much your sales increase as a result.