Link popularity is nothing to sneeze at. If you're building a website of any kind, you need it. The question is, how do you build the link popularity that makes you rise in the search engines?

Well, there are several ways. Here are just a few:

Article Marketing!
Link Reciprocity!
Link Purchasing!
Social Networking!
Blogging!

You could, of course, build a website and just hope that other webmasters like you well enough to link to you. But that is an unreliable method for a few reasons:

You can't force webmasters to link to you
To get webmasters to link to you voluntarily you'll have to provide them with maximum benefit, which is possible but unless you are the top-notch in your industry and you know it this is not as reliable as some people would have you believe
Some webmasters will not link to you no matter how much quality content you have unless you link back to them and you should know that reciprocal links aren't as valuable as one-way links so that would defeat the purpose (NOTE: I'm not saying reciprocal links are bad, just not as valuable as one-way links)

While you can get one-way links to your website that are valuable links by relying on other webmasters to see the value you offer, to count on that method alone would be disastrous. For one thing, even if every website in the world linked to yours, not all of them would benefit you because in order for one-way links to have maximum benefit they need to be from websites with a high PageRank. That adds another kink in your garden hose, doesn't it?

In other words, if you want to build link popularity, you need to rely on a number of methods to grow your website's ranking and not just rely on one method. In my opinion, one method stands out above all others as the quickest and most effective method for building link popularity: Blogging.

Here's how it works:

Each blog post is a single page in the search engines
Every time you link from your blog post to your website you are building a one-way link
If the blog is on your domain name, links to your website will benefit you more at Yahoo and MSN
If the blog is on a separate domain name, links to your website will benefit you at all of the search engines

Build link popularity through your blog using anchor text and signature lines. In your anchor text, take a keyword and make that a link two or three times in the body of your blog post. In your signature line, make the signature itself the name of your website or the URL, your actual website address. Every time you do that, you are building link popularity. Make link popularity a priority for your blog today.