Link Popularity is the amount of links pointing to your site from other sites. The more links you get to your site the better. Of course some links are better than others. For example. FFA Pages are usually completely ignored so if you have thousands of FFA Page links then it is not helping out your site unless someone goes through and clicks on the link. Not very many humans actually visit FFA Pages but there are a couple that do. a Link from the Yahoo homepage though will probably guarantee your website a top ranking. For that you would need to afford the $10,000 per day to advertise on the homepage. For a small business a link from the Yahoo directory will suffice.
DMOZ.org is another popularity directory and has a major influence on Google rankings. Because DMOZ employs volenteers there have been alot of reports of corruption and payoffs to get into the directory. I have personally experienced a few rejections merely because the editor working in that catagory was my competition. However, I have also meet a few "Clean" editors who live to edit for DMOZ. They have been kind and report corruption themselves. Just submit your website according to their guidelines and leave it alone. If they list you they list you but DMOZ is not the only game in town so don't get bent out of shape about it.
Links can be bought from link brokers. Some are a one time fee and some links cost you a monthly fee. If you decide to go this route do not purchase more than 5 links per month. Going over that may look to the search engines like you are trying to manipulate results. You also want to make sure the sites you are buying links from have your link on a high PageRank™ webpage. This ensures that your website gets the proper PageRank™ instead of possibly cheapening it.
Write articles and submit them to websites who will publish them. Make sure you provide your name and URL which will be published with your article. This is a great way to get links to your website. A good way to find relevant article sites simple search google or yahoo for "your keyword +articles" and remember to use the quotes. This is so the search engine knows you are looking for both words/phrases on the same page. Once you collect your article sites, write an informative article. You do not want to self-promote. The only thing you need from the article is the one way link to your site and possibly the name recognition. Simply submitting your articles is a killer way to generate one way links.
Put out press releases. You do not want to send them out for every little happening at your company but when something comes up that is news worthy by all means let people know about it. If you send it they will come. Make sure you put the press release in the proper format.
There are many ways to generate links to your website. Do your research and be persistant. If you follow those rules you will be fighting off business in no time.
