If you have an online business, you probably spend most of your time fretting over your link popularity. Link popularity has become the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how to increase the number of inbound links to your website without spending 10 hours per day exchanging links.

Simply put, the link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

One way to improve your link popularity is simply by advertising. If your site provides a meaningful service or sells popular products, people will link to you after you start advertising and your online business becomes popular.

You should also submit articles to article submission directories, and you can also submit your press releases to press release submission services. You are allowed to include a link to your website at the bottom of the article or press release. So, as your articles and releases are put into circulation, you will receive a lot of quality links. Also, you can submit your website to bloggers for their review by submitting to sites such as Blogitive.

You might want to join a link exchange so that you can trade links with other sites, but the links you will receive are usually worthless. Instead, you should focus on advertising (such as pay-per-click), submitting articles and press releases, and submitting to blogs or blog review sites.

I hope you now understand what you need to do to improve your link popularity. It can take years to build solid link popularity. Just make sure you follow the procedures outlined in this article, stay away from FFA pages and link farms, and you should do fine.