Search Engine Placement - Link Popularity Strategy
Link popularity, which refers to the number of links pointing to and from related sites, is considered by many search engine experts as the most important element of a site's relevance in search engines. Link Popularity Strategy
There are three types of links that will increase the link popularity of your site; internal, incoming and outgoing links.

1. Internal Links
Internal links are links to and from pages within a site. You can insure all your internal pages will be found and indexed by search engine by linking all your internal pages back and forth. By doing so, you are also telling search engine spiders that those are the important pages of your site.

2. Incoming Links
Incoming links are links pointing to a site from other websites. Incoming links are like votes to your website. If your website has more incoming links, the better chance your website will rank over your lower rank competitors' websites. Incoming links can also be from your other websites and search engine directories

3. Outgoing Links
Outgoing links are 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. This will improve the theme rating of your site. Some search engines now place a huge importance on a site's theme in determining its relevancy.

Link Keywords
It is important to include keywords in internal and outgoing text links. Keyword in a text link is one of the important factors determining the relevancy of a page. It is essential that they are used throughout a page. It is also important to include keywords in title tag, keyword tag, description tag, and heading text as well.

We suggest that you always name a page using the keywords relevant to the page. In turn, the visible link text used on other pages to link to the page should use the same keyword phrase as the page name.

For example, if the title of a page is "Link Popularity Strategy." Then the page name should be "link-popularity-strategy.html," or "link_popularity_strategy.html."

Link Quality
The quality of the links is just as important, if not more, than the number of links to your website. A incoming text link from a higher page rank website will boost your page rank much more than from a lower rank website.

Other type of sites you should also concentrate on getting links from include major search engines (Google), popular search portals (MSN), Web site directories (Yahoo and Open Directory Project), high trafficked sites, news sites (CNN), weblogs, and sites related to your site's theme.

Search engines consider links from major search engines and portals as a thumb up for your site.

Incoming Links Mistaken As Link Popularity Boosters
There are two types of incoming links that some people mistake as links that will boost their link popularity:

• Pay per click links, such as Overture.
• Affiliate program provider links, such as Commission Junction & BeFree

These links do not link directly to your website, so they will not help your link popularity rating. These links actually point to their own website, then redirect to your website.

Link Exchanges And Farms
Link farms are networks of heavily cross linked pages on one or more sites, with the sole intention of improving the link popularity of those pages and sites. Many of the major search engines consider such links as spam, do not use links from link exchange sites and link farms.

Conclusion
Do not underestimate the influence link popularity plays in the ranking of your Web pages. It is actually possible to achieve a high ranking almost entirely on link popularity alone. However, optimized website with high link popularity will be more likely ranking high on most search engines.