If you have a website, I hope that you know what link popularity is! If you don't, link popularity defined is the amount and quality of sites that are linking to your site. If you're a beginner, your site's link popularity is probably zero. When your site is brand new, there aren't any sites linking to it.

This is a pretty big problem! You need to have sites linking to yours. You need to have a ton of links. You also need to get good links. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all take your link popularity into consideration when they rank your site, so having a good number of quality links is crucial to your success with all of them.

If your link popularity is zero, you probably aren't in the search engines at all. The engines find most sites by following links. Yes, you can get in by submitting your site, but that process takes months. You can easily get included in less than a week.

If you're a beginner, and you have a new site, building links can be especially difficult. Other webmasters won't want to trade with you, because your site is too new. Truthfully, a link from you won't do them much good! You need to use alternate methods for a while. Here are a few ideas:

Use articles! If your reading this article, have a look down at the bottom, where you will probably see a nice link to a site. If you can create a nice, useful article, you can have it published on other sites. That might sound difficult, but it's easier than you think to get published. Each site that publishes your article will publish your link!

There are quite a few sites out there that will market your articles for you. Article Marketer is one of the best. Their site is easy to use and very effective. A good article can get you a hundred or so links. If you hit the ball out of the park with a fantastic article, you can get upwards of 10,000 links. Webmasters everywhere will publish it for you.

Use forums! Forums are places where people get together to ask and answer questions. You can quickly establish yourself as an expert in your field by helping others in forums. Many forums will allow you to have a link to your site in your signature. Every post will get you a link.

Links in forums help you to increase your link popularity, and also get you some direct traffic. Forum messages are often read thousands of times. Each visitor to your message will at least see the nice link to your site. Some of them ultimately will click on it!

Some forums don't allow you to post links. In this case, be respectful! Posting a link in a forum that doesn't allow it will get you banned, and will be extra work for the forum admin. You may ask him for a link later, and he'll probably say no! It would be best to only use this method in forums that welcome it. All you have to do is read their terms and conditions.

There are, of course, other ways to get links to your site. These two are great for beginners. They are simple and effective. Most of all, you don't need an established site to use them.