With the web today you "sorta haveta" have a rank in the major search engines if you want to be seen. I mean with 250,000,000, yes 250 million searches a day on Google alone, how are your visitors and potential customers going to find you?

Now, there are numerous ways in which a Search Engine ranks a website; by keyword density, relevancy, content, etc. etc.. But Link Popularity is an ever growing statistic in how the Search Engines continue to rank websites.

Link popularity, is how "popular" your website is. That is how popular your site is compared to other websites. To put it another way; it is the number of "other websites" that have a link on their website to your website. Did you get that? :)

Now, although Link Popularity "building" is a large science and art in itself, I'll briefly touch on a couple ways in which you can see how popular you are and how to go about improving your link popularity.

A small side note though, is link popularity is a BIG way in which Google ranks their search results. They refer to this as "PageRank". With the Search Engine, FAST, they call it "link score".

Now there are quite a few software programs and sites that can help build your link popularity as well as check your popularity.

Now, there are many ways to check your link popularity. But if you simply want to get a small idea, a little way for you to do this is go to any search engine and type in, "link popularity", without the quotes, and there will be lots of results for you to choose from. And then simply pick a site and check your site popularity.

Now, a small way to build your popularity is by going to the altavista.com engine and type in "link:yourcompetitor.com", and the results that show up will tell you what sites have posted links to your competitor's websites.

Then simply visit a site and look for a contact method, be it an email address, phone number, etc. and express an interest to them in trading links. It is a win-win method for both sites so, you have nothing to lose. Some might happily oblige, and some might not. Its certainly worth a try.

In summary, link popularity can be a never ending chore if you have a website. This is because having links on related websites to your website is a very good form of Targeted Traffic which never really quits, because most related links stay up for a long period of time, thus providing a continuous stream of targeted traffic, which, by the way is totally cost free.

And Search Engine traffic and reciprocal link traffic are the best forms of Targeted Traffic there is online. And both are free.