Link Popularity is sometimes called a site's significance ranking because it is believed that one measure of a site's "value" is the number of other Web sites who felt your site was sufficiently important to link to. The number of links to your site from other sites is key to the success of your site. The more websites linking to your site makes it easier you are to find and the more traffic you will get.

Google says the best way to ensure that pages in your site are indexed is to build links to them. The more links that point at your pages, the more likely the page will be crawled (and perhaps even ranked well). Be aware that "popularity" is only one part of the link analysis systems that search engines such as Google use to rank web pages. The quality and context of links is also taken into account, rather than sheer numbers.

PageRank. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.

Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with results extremely difficult. Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search.

Source: Google

Every major crawler-based search engine uses link analysis as part of their ranking algorithms. This is done because it is very difficult for webmasters to "fake" good links, in the way they might try to spam search engines by manipulating the words on their web pages. As a result, link analysis gives search engines a useful means of determining which pages are good for particular topics.

By building links, you can help improve how well your pages do in link analysis systems. The key is understanding that link analysis is not about "popularity." In other words, it's not an issue of getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from good web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.

		To check your Web site's link popularity visit any of the major search engines and type in link:yourwebsitename.com (example: link:yahoo.com). See who links to your web site: