Link Popularity is the quantity and quality of all the links pointing to your page. It is one of the most important factors in ranking highly in the search engines. As a result, dubious webmasters and SEO companies have generated link farms (FFA pages), unusable mini websites and piled their sites with irrelevant links. Getting many relevant, high quality links should be your focus when trying to improve your site's link popularity.

Ways to get links and improve link popularity:

1. Write Articles - Articles are great ways to gain quality one way links. At the end of your article include a resource box. In it include a little about yourself, a link to your site and possibly a freebie (ebook? e-course?) to draw readers to your site.

2. Reciprocal Link - Some say reciprocal linking is dead while others worship it. Neither of these two groups are completely correct. Reciprocal linking increases link popularity and can bring in more traffic than search engines in certain cases. It all is dependent on who is linking to you and how much traffic they receive. With a few strategically placed links on popular pages your site could receive immense amounts of traffic.

Hint: Only text links improve link popularity! Watch out for javascript links that don't help in improving link popularity. These links will act like normal links, but do not help in your search engine optimization campaign.

3. Make your site link worthy - A webmaster of another site won't link to you if your site has major flaws. Misspellings, broken links, bad color schemes, poor navigation and more are all problems that could keep you from getting links. Fix them and make your site look professional and link worthy.

4. Be at the top of your industry with compelling content.

5. Create tools and ebooks with imbedded links.

6. Participate in forums and include a small, inoffensive text link in your signature. Keywords should be included in the link's anchor text.

7. Submit to directories.

8. Get the word out! Tell everyone, family, friends, employees and whoever else.

9. Ask associate and client sites for a link.

10. Search for sites linking to competition, they may link to you also.
Derek Croote is the webmaster of http://freeseoquiz.com/ He encourages you to try any of his free SEO quizzes or read his daily updated SEO blog.