The most popular search engine Google, places great significance on the link popularity of your web site. In fact, you can even get listed in Google without submitting your site to them, by getting other sites to link to yours. Finding many high ranking sites that link to yours, will improve the search engine ranking of your own web site.

Four effective ways to increase link popularity

1. Get your site listed in the search engine directories - first submit your site to the human edited directories of ODP (Open Directory Project - dmoz.org) and Yahoo (yahoo.com). Getting listed in these directories will give your site a boost in link popularity and improve search engine ranking in other search engines.

However, this may take some time.

You can get listed much faster by getting links from niche specific directories. Find these directories by doing a search on the major search engines with the primary keywords of your web site.

2. Provide high quality content - people will naturally link to your site if you have what they want (i.e. articles, software, etc). This will save you a lot of time searching for quality links yourself.

Optimizing your content with well placed keywords, will improve your search engine ranking dramatically. Search engines love focused content.

Don't you love it when you immediately find what you are searching for?

One way of achieving this is by writing and publishing articles. You can include a link at the end of your article. When your article gets published, you will automatically have gained a link to your site.

3. Requesting links from other sites - request links from sites that ideally have a high search engine ranking. Start by including a link from your site to theirs. Include a paragraph describing what your link is about. This helps achieve a greater number of clickthroughs to your site.

Request that they do the same when linking to your web site. If you provide this for them (with some of your primary keywords included of course), and provide quality information, you will have a greater chance of gaining a high quality link.

4. Write a testimonial - write a favorable review of someone's product or web site. Include the benefits you received through visiting their site. If that person wishes to use your testimony on their site, make sure they include a link back to your web site.