Link Popularity is the number of links that point to your website, usually the links in text are the ones that are counted in the your website's link popularity because that's what search engines can read and follow, links pointing to your website that uses an image, flash or is in a frame will most likely be not counted as part of your link popularity. So avoid placing your links in any of those formats if your looking to increase your link popularity from that link.

Link popularity increases with the increase of the number of back links your website has, that usually increases your Google page rank as well.

The number of back links that search engines index differs from one another, Yahoo and MSN usually report all of the back links they have indexed, Google only reports a number of the back links they have indexed, Google also usually ignores links that are coming from the same domain, for example you could place your link on the footer of a website with 10,000 indexed pages, when indexed Yahoo and MSN are most likely to report them all, or a big part of them where Google will only report the ones on the main page's of the website.

If built carefully, increasing your link popularity, usually through a good link building campaign will increase your search engine rankings for your target keywords, of course the odds increase with good onsite optimization for the same keywords.

You can check out our webmaster tools section for a number of tools including a link popularity tool.

- Choosing the right keywords

- What is a page rank?