One of the criteria for website popularity and enhanced website search engine ranking is the quantity and quality of incoming links to your website. Links leading to your site from other sites - incoming links - are an important factor affecting how well your site ranks in the search engines. It's important to know how many incoming links your site has, how they break down by page rank (PR), and what anchor text is used in these links.

Probably the best way to get webmasters to link to your site is by offering to exchange reciprocal links. This is obviously beneficial to both webmasters because both of your web sites benefit from new targeted, relevant links. Search engines see all of the new links pointing from other quality, relevant sites to your site and, over time, increase your rank.

Google has revealed the secrets of its search ranking technology by filing a patent application. It was found that Google values organic link building - building links that progress naturally rather than appearing artificial. An example of non-progressive links is when a whole page of links is posted to your website at once, in an attempt to circumvent the natural progression of search engine ranking. Progressive linking is very different from using indiscriminate "link farms", which will ultimately result in you being penalised by the search engines.

So how do you achieve progressive link popularity with the minimum of effort and where do you start to look for sites that have a website theme in common with yours? Unless you have the time you really do not want to spend precious hours gathering links, writing e-mails, and checking that sites you link to still link back. A links program should be there to work for you not the other way around - if you can set it and virtually forget it, all the better.

An ideal tool for building link exchanges the way Google likes them, would be to use a program that allows you to grow your link exchanges gradually and gain links from many different sites letting you build as large a reciprocal link program as you want. Automation is the key, unless of course you like tedious work. So you can do all this manually and accept the frustrations that go with it or you could use a program that will carry out the task automatically.

A program that fills the criteria is Link Machine which automates every step of the link management process. Importantly, new links come to you; you do not have to go searching for websites similar to yours. Your sites visitors can submit new links through Link Machines' submission form and it can inspect each link that's submitted and only accept those that meet your requirements by filtering out links with inappropriate content, low page rank, and more. Other Link Machine users can be invited to exchange links and with a single click, you can accept an invitation and build a new link exchange instantly, making it simple to exchange quality and relevant links. You can decide whether you'd like to manually approve each link that is submitted, or run your link directory on full automatic.

Because Link Machine is a PHP application that runs from your web site, it can update your link pages the moment you make a change, or the moment another site's webmaster chooses to exchange links with you. Link Machine is a powerful program that does what it is supposed to do, that is to provide a fully automatic linking process for your website, thereby saving you hours of tedious work.

For more information on Link Machine please visit http://www.1st-4-income.com/linkpopularity.html

The time and effort that is saved by using a fully automated program like Link Machine cannot be over emphasised, particularly when you want to improve the link popularity for your website and the icing on the cake is that the software is free to download.