Improving your link popularity is a big part of optimizing your website for search engines. Many webmasters ignore this very rewarding process. The most common reason for this is time it takes. Many webmasters just don’t have time. There are services out there that will do this for you, but if you have time to do this yourself, I highly recommend you to do this! Please take some time to read through this article and learn how you can get most out of improving your link popularity in a short amount of time.

What not to do:

One thing that is very important is quality of links that link to your website. Links pointing to your from a low ranking, low traffic and unrelated website are very close to pointless. Before we go through he few steps to building a quality link directory, there are a few things you need to know not to do:

- Do not add your link to a large link list that many webmasters upload to their website and consist of links only. This is considered a link farm. Important search engines like Google recognize these links pages as link farms and will not count these as incoming links. In fact it could hurt your rankings. Some other search engines are know for banning your websites if you participate in one of these link farms.

- Do not create a link directory and use this directory for multiple websites. Not only does this get close to being a link farm, it also creates a “links nest”. It is very easy for search engine spiders to recignize that all these pages are same.

- Do not use Zeus for creating your links pages. Google does not spider links pages created by this program which makes it pointless.

- Do not decide whether you will link to a website just because of its Google Page Rank. If it is a nice professional website, and it is a good resource for your visitors, you should definatley link to it!

8 Steps to improving your link popularity successfully:

1. To make process of searching for links and building your link directory easier and time saving, we recommend using Arelis (Axandras Reciprocal Link Solution) . This award winning program will search for potential link partners and also create your link directories however you like them. The link directory pages are fully customizable to match looks of your website. It will also help you sending out emails to webmasters to ask them to trade links.

The search engines are forever changing way they rank websites and what is important to achieve a higher ranking. Even with these everchanging factors, there are 8 important points that you must use with your website that are not likely to change any time soon.

1. Domain Name It is better to register a domain with a keyword in it, unless you are trying to brand yourself (think Coca Cola or Ebay). For instance, if your name is John Smith and you sell golf items you would be better off by registering a name like www.golfproducts.com instead of www.johnsmith.com.

Unfortunately with millions of website domain names being purchased all time, finding a related domain name not already taken can be a daunting task. Still it is worth it in end because it will carry more significance with search engines.

2. Title Tag This is an often overlooked place to input keywords. Have you ever been to a website and bar at top of page just said 'untitled' or 'homepage'? That reflects how little site designer knew about SEO. Always put a descriptive title on EVERY page of your website. Put something like 'Find golf clubs, golf clothes and latest pro golf tips', instead of 'John's golf shop'.

Make sure not to go overboard and just list 10 or more keywords or long sentences in a row or search engines will think you are trying to spam them. Think quality over quantity. The title tag should contain one keyword rich descriptive sentence.

3. Meta Tags The importance of meta tags in today's SEO world is still being debated. It is still advisable to include a meta tag keywords and meta tag description in your code. A lot of times search engines will pull your description tag to show in your websites search result. If nothing is there it may not show anything at all or it may pull first sentence off of your page which might be completely irrelevent to your intended audience.

Do not, I repeat do not list 100 or more keywords in keyword tag. This technique used to work years ago, but search engines recognize this technique and will consider it spam. Place no more than 10 keywords in meta keywords tag.

4. Link Strategies Another important tip is to include keywords when linking to other websites or pages within your own site. For example it is better to have a sentence like this 'Find out latest professional golf tips.' then to say 'click here for latest professional golf tips.' This also applies to any outbound links to other related websites. Include keywords on part you want visitors to click on.