There is no 'instant solution' to boosting your link popularity. An effective link promotion campaign involves....

1. Locating established quality web sites containing content relevant to your web site.

2. Approaching the webmaster of each site in a professional manner and explaining the benefit of linking to your web site.

3. Organizing your link promotion campaign.... tracking your results and following up when necessary.

Increasing your link popularity is, in theory, simple. All you have to do is increase the number of links that point to your web site. One way of doing this is submitting your web sites to directories like Yahoo! , Google, MSN.com and The Open Directory . Another way is through a link exchange .

Increasing the link popularity of your web site can dramatically improve your search engine rankings. Most major search engines have tailored their algorithms (internal rules used to decide which sites are given priority) to reward sites which have high link popularity. Why? Two reasons...

i>.Search engines have found that judging a site by who links to it is one of the best indicators of site quality. After all, not many webmasters make a habit out of linking to bad or less than useful web sites.

ii>. In the past, search engines have played a continual cat and mouse game with many webmasters who try to 'trick the engines' or 'beat the system'. Link popularity is one of the few factors which is very difficult to abuse (a webmaster would have to have control of tens or hundreds of different sites located on different servers). As a result, it is a safe bet that the major engines will continue to rely on link popularity and reward 'well-linked' sites in the future.

It is this approach which has made search engines like Google the new standard. In fact, Google's entire approach relies heavily on link promotion and link quality. In describing their proprietary ranking system (PageRank), Google's web site says the following...