Although Google uses the phrase "link popularity" as a way to describe how they ranked sites in the early days, and still do in some fashion, link popularity means far more to website promoters than a measure of search engine worthiness.

Link popularity as a marketing tool was around long before Google or any search engines existed. Links are the thread that weaves the web together. Search engines didn't invent this, they capitalized on it just like all sites on the web have since the beginning.

Your link popularity in a real sense is not a contrived "weight and measure" of your site's worthiness to be ranked well in a search engine.

Your link popularity is actually based upon how many traffic-driving, visible links you have pointing to your site from other sites in your niche and even from less "relevant" sites than search engines want you to be linked to.

If you can get targeted traffic to your site from another site, regardless of search engine imposed rules for relevancy, by exchanging links or posting on a forum or sharing an article or press release, by all means do so!

Do not worry about people telling you that you are going to ruin your rankings in the engines if you don't link properly. 90% of the advice out there is from search engine junkies and geeks who rely 100% on search engine traffic.

Without search engines, they couldn't market their sites to save their lives. Of course they don't want to do anything to hurt their rankings, their entire livelihood is tied up in that one source of traffic!

Those people are far different from average website owners. We take the search engine rankings we can get PLUS all the other traffic from other sites that we can get. According to our own in-house case studies that's 80%-85% of the traffic of average sites that have a well rounded marketing campaign!

So it is easy to see why we pay less attention to search engines than the geeks do. The engines only contribute at best 15% of the visitors to any of the sites in our network. (And that's for purposefully optimized sites using all the tricks and tactics the geeks told us to!)

Therefore, nowadays we give search engines no more than 15% of our time and go for real link popularity that includes a plethora of promotion options.

While people who sit and wait on search engine traffic often find themselves getting bored with little to do, we never run out of promotion that we can do for our sites.

There is always something you can be doing to gain link popularity (link popularity = marketing) every moment you are logged on.

If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs without a clue what you are going to do next to promote your site, there is something wrong with your marketing campaign. It is deficient in Vitamin Link.

You can fix an anemic marketing campaign by spending more time getting content created and syndicated, adopting RSS as a highly valuable traffic generator, and making partnerships out of link partners.

Get (and give) more than simple link exchanges. Exchange articles, other content, and get each others' links in prominent places around your sites.

Exchange newsletter sign up pages (squeeze pages) or allow people to additionally opt in to your partners list after they opt in to yours.

There are far more ways to promote your site and gain valuable, REAL link popularity than myopic and short-sighted search engine marketing could ever give you.

Don't get caught up in the search engine marketing myth. There are only ever 10 spots available for your keywords that will get you any significant traffic from any given engine.

What surprises most people who get far enough along in their real link popularity campaign is that they get great rankings in the engines after all. Just by marketing to their audience and not to the engines.

Case in point: A lot of search engine traffic is generated to my blog and other sites from people searching for "jack humphrey." But customers and readers KNOW to search for my name from all the other marketing that I do to put my name at their fingertips. It's branding as much as link popularity.

The end result is easy search engine rankings for a name that is not competitive but that, because of all the other marketing efforts in my campaign, puts me in the right places in the engines without any more effort than simply increasing my link popularity by marketing to my niche market.

Marketing to your market, wherever they surf and not just where they occasionally search, is a fail-safe way to market any kind of site on the web. One that lowers the risk of failure (over single-minded search engine obsession) and guarantees longevity and ever-increasing traffic over time.