Link Popularity. Great, you have a well optimized website and you found perfect keywords which you used in your website's content and meta tags. What's next? If you managed to find keywords will very low competition then website optimization alone can be enough to put you on top of search engine's result pages. Unfortunately, most keywords with good traffic have relatively high competition and you still need to work on your link building before you can expect any real results. Get more information on link popularity in the Google section.
What is link popularity? Link popularity is the number of links from other websites to your website, otherwise known as inbound links. Search engines like Google pay the most attention to this factor, even more then to your website's content or meta tags. They figured that if many websites link to you, using your keyword in the link text, then your website must really be relative to that keyword. Basically, for you that means the more links the better.
How do I get other websites to link to my website? There are many ways to get links. First of all, you need to submit your website to as many search engines and web directories as possible. You can request a list of hundreds of search engines and directories, that you can submit your website to for free, from SEMBooster.com by submitting a form in the top right corner of this page. Another way to get more inbound links is by link exchange. By setting up a partners page on your website you can start trading links with other websites in your industry; this will get you both quality traffic as well as better link popularity. Another way to get links is by simply purchasing link space on other websites, like portals.
Submitting to search engines and directories. This is the step where a lot of people make a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake anyone can make at this point is to try to take shortcuts. If you thinking about using some of those software programs that offer to submit to millions of search engines and directories, DON'T do it. Put yourself in the shoes of a search engine administrators, would you rather accept a listing from a person that took time to visit your website and manually submit his/her website (possibly even click on some ads or at least create more traffic) or would you accept it from a software company that sends you millions of spam listings every day? Submitting to search engines and directories is a long process but you should invest time to do it manually instead of relying to half-legal tactics of many software programs. Check out our search engine optimization tools page for more assistance.