In particular, solid link popularity can literally make or break a site with the search engines. However, one of the most difficult areas of SEO is building link popularity. it’s not the technique that we are concerned about, it’s the intention.” Which is similar to one way links. Now that we’ve gotten the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get down to business: learning ways to increase the link popularity of our sites.

Be sure you have developed genuine content on your Web site of interest to the trading partner. Search for your target keywords. Otherwise move on and take their site off of yours. This is also just like link building membership. Search for sites that rank high for search terms that are important to you, then look through the search results for sites that do not compete with you.

Inktomi’s link analysis program policy is that sites that link to its relevant topic category page on Yahoo receive improved hub factor rankings because of Yahoo’s popularity. If your site has multimedia files, there are multimedia search engines you can submit to. You can probably stretch it to advertising directories. Advertising agencies and printing shops can link to their customers and vice versa.

In my Vault, I list about 80 search resources. Visit Search Engine Guide and Beaucoup for a listing of vertical engines and directories. Write a 300-500 word article on a topic of real interest to their target market and submit it to the Webmaster, as well as to other e-zines reaching the same target audience. Actually you win twice! First, because you have a good testimonial for your product/service and second, you’ve increased your link popularity — all with one link! Make sure that the link under the testimonial opens in a new browser window so that you don’t lose that visitor to the linked site.

Spend time building valuable content on your site through different keyword windows. Sometimes this can be similar to one way link building to many people. You can take this approach a step further by offering your article or newsletter to other sites with the condition that they link back to your site.