Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to your website, which play a substantial factor in the overall outcome of boosting your site higher in the Search Engine rankings. Search engines such as Google, yahoo, msn use a special link popularity analysis system to rank web pages. Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results.
Link Popularity is the number and the quality of inbound links to a particular page. Search engines use this data to help determine where your web page will rank in the search results. The number and quality of inbound links is as important as the optimisation of page content and is also referred to as off-site SEO.
You can enter the URL on Google, MSN or Yahoo to search linking to a your website:
link: yourdomain.com
Strategies to be considered to boost link popularity & website ranking:
Link sub pages from the home page so that a search engine can transfer some link popularity to the subpages.
Anchor text(links text) should be with relevant keywords that are pointing to pages within a site. this helps link context, not link popularity.
links from websites with high Page Rank, can be one of the most powerful factor in link popularity.
Links should be from genuine websites i.e. web sites that do not use "spammy techniques" for link popularity.
To increase link popularity, many webmasters interlink multiple domains that they own, but often search engines will filter out these links, as such links are not independent votes for a page and are only created to trick the search engines.