In this week’s Candles of Eden SEO Primer, we’re going to talk about popularity. See, optimization is a lot like high school. There are the popular people…and then there are the rest of us. The popular kids all seem to know each other and hang out together…and breaking into that clique seems like an impossible task.

The search engines are like that girl or guy you had a crush on, but he/she only has eyes for popular kids. You want desperately to get his/her attention and have tried all sorts of tricks, but nothing has worked. Luckily for SoyLuscious® resellers, we’re here to show you how to impress that significant someone.

Popularity in SEO is a numbers game. But it’s not just how many people you know…who you know has a lot to do with it. And as far as the search engines are concerned, who you know is determined based on the number of incoming links to your site, and how popular those linking sites are.

The key to popularity is to build links from popular sites. Period.

This comes in one of two ways: (a) you create the links yourself, or (b) others link to you.

Creating your own links is easier, of course, whether through article pr, signature lines in forum discussions or commenting on blogs. Just remember, the popularity of those sites you build links on counts for a lot. I suggest installing the Google Toolbar on your browser and activating the PageRank monitor. If the site has a page rank of 4 or higher, focus on creating your links there.

Getting others to link to you can be tougher, especially if yours is a straight e-commerce site. Product reviews are one way to do this. Another might be to just send a favorite blogger a candle with a thank you note letting them know you appreciate their writing. They will probably be so surprised, they’ll write about you (and hopefully your candles) on their blog.

What you don’t want to do is send and email to a blogger begging for or demanding links (you’d be surprised how many people seem to think they deserve a link just for reading a blog). But if the audience is right, and you start up a conversation via email with the blog’s writer, then the opportunity to ask them to link to your site might present itself.

Which brings me to another point: the whole purpose of the blogosphere is to be an interactive medium. Comments, co-blogging, and email are all part of the conversation that blogs are intended to start. Don’t be afraid to contact a blogger with questions…often that is why they started the blog in the first place (and your questions are likely to prompt future posts, making their job a little easier).

But I digress. The whole point here is, to get popular (for the search engines) all you have to do is create solid links to your content. Set a goal of yourself to create three links per day, and at the end of the year, you’ll have more than 1000 inbound links, which will put you ahead of about 99 percent of the online marketers out there.