Link Popularity is one of the most important factors affecting your Search Engine rankings. When your site is popular with other web-sites, the Search Engines love you, but if you are the new kid on the block, they ignore you - totally. It's great to be popular and improving your Link Popularity will also get you higher rankings on the search engines.
Here are a few ways you can grow your inbound links.
1) Articles: Almost anybody can write articles. This is the easiest way to get started on your way to Search Engine manna. It's just a question of putting down your thoughts in a coherent manner. As long as the information you are providing is useful and valid, your articles will be sought after by publishers out there. There are also hundreds of article directories on the net.
2) Blogs: Blogs are not as easy to do as Articles are. But they are a very useful tool, nevertheless. When you have a blog, you have an audience. It's like a fan base. They have certain expectations of you. They want you to churn out hit singles or albums. But they want you to give them more. Even though they started out as mere diaries or daily jottings of a few people, currently they are excellent link building, content management and search engine optimization tools.
3) Free Products: The easiest way to do this is to write a tool and provide it for download. Or maybe even provide a service for free. The greatest example of building a business with free service that comes to mind is hotmail.com. Once your service becomes a must-have, it's only a matter of time before you can start making money from it. Also you can have people point to your site to give their customers access to your tool.
4) Allow People To Link: Always create a page on your website that will enable people interested in your website to link it with their website. Alternatively, request website owners you are familiar with or the same industry, to add a link to your website preferably with a catchy description of a few lines.
5) Trackbacks: This is the easiest way to get your links out there. What you do is go to other blogs (Authority Sites) in your industry and become a regular contributor. Or comment on the blogs. Along with your signature, most people provide a link to your web-site. And the more links you have pointing back to you, the more popular you get. Also, when you become a major contributor/commentor, people start valuing your opinion more.
6) Syndication: You can offer your articles to other sites for publishing for free or for payment. Your article links back to your site.
7) Reciprocal links: You provide a link to another peer site, in return for them linking back to you. This is a good way to get your target industry users to come to your site. Also you introduce your users to other sites that they may be interested in visiting. They will be thankful to you for pointing them in the right direction. And they come to trust you more.
8) Partner links: Your local Chamber of commerce, Suppliers, Resellers, Affiliates, Sites selling complementary products etc.
9) Links from Forum Signatures: These do not carry as much weight in terms of SEO as one might think. Yes, they are one-way links, and yes, they can be from pages that have content relevant to your site. But that doesn't mean much unless your links appear in a forum's thread that is popular enough to be linked to from static web pages, or the thread's URL doesn't contain many random characters (historically they have been harder for search engines to index). Most pages at a forum are only linked to from one other page: the main category of the topic. Getting links on pages with little to no link popularity themselves won't help your site much.
10) Directory Submissions: Directories can provide you with a one-way link on pages with highly relevant text. Some directories, like the Yahoo! Directory are weighted very heavily by other search engines. A link from these directories can be the most valuable link your site can receive. While there are thousands of free directories on the web today, paying for the more prestigious listings will go extremely far in not only increasing your link popularity, but also establishing a level of legitimacy with the major search engines.
Be noticed:
1. No amount of link popularity will help you if don't have the content to keep visitors at your site. So start with good content.
2. Make sure that you are being linked to by Authority sites with a Good PageRank. Also the linking sites should somehow be relevant to your industry. If not, it only serves to confuse the Search Engines and your rankings will suffer.
3. Some forums even use a 'nofollow' tag on outbound links as a means to curb link spammers. By all means, if you are a regular participant at forums, mention your site in your signature for the purpose of creating awareness and click-through's from forum readers, but not solely for link popularity purposes.
