But a good linking strategy is necessary to build link popularity – a measure of the popularity of a website based on the number of other website’s linking to it. And at the same time it has become very difficult to compete on the internet with websites that have 1000s of backlinks, sites that have their carefully chosen anchor text firmly in place. If you as a webmaster were to gain one new link to your site every day for one year you would only have 365 backlinks. Even with a more optimistic 2 links a day we are still only talking about 730 links. They may seem like a lot but in the real world of the internet and depending on the keywords you are competing for, you may need hundreds or even thousands more.

Because link popularity is the ultimate tool in achieving ranking. Link popularity is measured by the number and quality of inbound links to your site. The more you increase the link popularity of your web site, the probability of maintaining a higher search engine position for a longer period of time becomes more likely. Inbound links help to attain high search engine rankings for your web site, while producing traffic from visitors clicking through on the links themselves. So you have a dilemma. You need hundreds maybe even thousands of inbound links to your site. But how can one individual possibly achieve this goal given the numbers of backlinks needed and the hours it takes to accomplish such a task?

There is only one solution. A link exchange. The only effective way to get the sheer amount of backlinks needed to compete is to coop with other webmasters in a large group and share the wealth of pages that is owned by the group. It is similar to risk management. You utilized the power of large numbers of people. Link exchanges are sites that bring webmasters together to cooperate in the exchange of links for the benefit building both pagerank and link popularity. They are commonly used to gain link popularity which will increase ranking in search engines like Yahoo! or Google. Both of these engines use link popularity as a factor in calculating web pages ranking in the search engine results.

Be very careful to choose the correct anchor text when signing up to a link exchange. Anchor text is the text within the hyperlink. The major search engines look carefully at this text to help determine what your page is about. For example if there are 1000 pages linking to yours with the words “buy a car” then you will likely do very well when someone uses the search phrase “buy a car”. An example of the power of anchor text is what is known as a “Google bomb”. If enough sites link to a specific website with the same anchor text then that site will rank well for that term regardless of whether the keywords are even found on the page.

All website creators vie to have the maximum number of viewers. Most people search on their area of preference using search engines. These search engines rank websites and display the results in order, based on the link popularity and the keywords present in the articles. Thus enhancing the link popularity is at a premium. Some methods to do so are:

Submit the website to directories: Nowadays there are plenty of directories available and one can add a website url free of cost. Thus directories play a very important role in building link popularity. However, submit your articles only to those directories that are search engine affable especially google. The best way to determine this is by checking if the links on the directory are direct links or redirecting ones.

Forum Signatures: An effective method to build up link popularity is to link your website from your signature in the forum. Ensure that you hyperlink the website and the main keywords covered in the article.

Link Exchanges: This method involves exchanging your website links with other similar or related websites. It is not the most effective method but is being employed increasingly nowadays due to the inception of a number of websites that specialize in exchanging links. If you do not want to approach any of these websites, another way is to directly get in touch with the webmasters via email. Any webmaster will be ever willing to exchange links if he finds that your site could be beneficial to him too.

Writing Articles: One of the most innovative ways is to write articles and publish them in other websites. When you write an article, you create a resource box at the end that contains a ink to your website. It is natural that if people on that site are impressed with your article they will visit your website too, thus enhancing your number of viewers.

Allow People To Link: Always create a page on your website that will enable people interested in your website to link it with their website.

Simple Request: Request website owners you are familiar with, to add a link to your website preferably with a catchy description of a few lines.