One of the best ways to promote your website is by finding high quality links. This type of site promotion is known as link popularity. Basically, the more popular your website, the more other sites will want to link to your site. This is important as a lot of links that lead to your website from other sites will lead to an increase in your visitors and if your website is designed properly, an increase in sales as well.

Search engines also like to see link popularity. Search engines have a specific algorithm that they use in order to rank websites and quality links are a key component to that formula. So how do you build quality links to help promote your website?

Building up your quality links is usually as easy as spending some time researching the Internet for some different sites and then e-mailing those webmasters to ask for a link exchange. Some will go for and some will not, but it is a numbers game, meaning the more number of e-mails you send out the higher the probability is that you will get some link exchanges. When you agree to exchange links with another website you will then put the link of that website somewhere on your website and they will return the favor in kind. As easy as this sounds there are some things that should be factored in before you begin requesting links left and right. Here are some things to consider before you ask a webmaster to exchange links with you:

•    Page Rank: You need to consider the website's page rank. To find the page rank you need to download the Google Toolbar and it will be one of the icons on the toolbar. The ranking system goes from 0 to 10 with 0 being the worst and 10 being the best. If a site is 5 or more, it is a really good one. First find out what your page rank is and then look at other sites using your ranking as a barometer. If you have a page rank of 3 then you do not want to go with anything less than that.

•    Relevance: If you come across a website that is a page rank 7 and they agree to exchange links with you that is great; unless the site has no relevance to your own. Google and other major search engines love relevancy and hate irrelevancy. If you have a website that sells cell phones then you need to link with relevant sites, such as a cell phone carrier, or a cell phone accessories carrier. It does you no good to exchange links with a dog food maker, no matter what their rank is.

•    Page listing: Before you agree to a link exchange you need to know what page on the participating website your link will go. If their home page is a page rank 4 and they put you on a different page that is a page rank 1 then you will obviously benefit less. Never assume your link will go on the home page.

Once you get enough quality links you will no longer have promote your website with e-mail requests as a funny thing will happen. The more popular your website becomes the more people will want to be involved with it. After a while you will be getting multiple e-mails requesting your link exchange. Just use the same guidelines and you will be able to effectively continue to grow your website with link popularity.