If you are new with Web Hosting and/or Web Design there's some things that you need to know before you think about link exchange or link popularity. First if you don't have a domain name or you don't have a web hosting you need to go and take a look to this article Things you should know about Web Hosting. If you have your domain name and you already choose a web hosting you need to know a little more about Link Exchange, Inbound Link and Link Popularity.
Link Popularity - You need to have a Link Exchange and/or inbound link in your website if you want people to be able to get to your website. If the search engines don't know that you exist your website will never get to be shown on the search engines and the reason for this is that there are too many pages on the internet right now. The only way people go to your website if your site is not listed in the search engines is by knowing your domain name or if you advertised the site in magazines, newspapers, or other methods of advertising.
Link Exchange or Reciprocal Links - You should have links exchange to help you get on the top positions on the search engines no matter how big or small your website is. You'll hear or read a lot of articles that tells you that its better to have only inbound links and this is good but with my own experience I can tell you that having Link Exchange and Inbound links at the same time had help me a lot in my websites to be on a decent ranking on the search engines. You can find a lot of Link Exchange programs out there some free and some that you have to paid, if you want or needs more information about those you can visit this page. Just have in mind that you need to choose whatever is best for your business and for your budget.
Inbound Links - Writing articles and posting articles in different websites are the type of links you should go for. Try to reach a webmaster from a website and some how negotiate with that person to see if they add a link to your website without you having to add a link in your website to them, this is another way to get inbound links. In this type of links you pretty much can find services out there that you have to pay to get inbound links going to your web site. If you want more information about this type of link you can visit this page.
If you don't have the right content on your page for the keywords that you are trying to rank then you are kind of wasting your time and money, so have in mind that Link Popularity is only part of the puzzle in Search Engine Optimization. I hope that this article helps you to understand more about how Link Popularity works.