Link popularity flows from the number and quality of sites that link to you. The link value can be further enhanced by the anchor text used and the use of keywords in the anchor text is better still.

Insertion of your url in comments and trackback is regularly suggested for link popularity improvement in the blog world but I fear that this is out of date advice.

Following previous abuse of this opportunity the default configuration of most blog software is to put a rel=nofollow tag in any comments and trackbacks. This tag prevents any page rank or status flowing from the original site to the linked site in the search engine calculations.

Accordingly you could be wasting valuable time if you trawl the web to insert comments in high rank sites and expect to improve your link popularity.

There is nothing wrong with reading blog articles and commenting on the authors thoughts, that is one of the underlying purposes of a blog. Engaging in the topic community will increase your knowledge and visibility. Whilst the search engines will not allocate link popularity from the url it will be visible to readers and you may attract visitors to your site.

Happy commenting.