Who to link to
Believe it or not, the best thing you could do for building link popularity it to link out to your competition, and have them link to you. The reason is that your competition will likely be categorized the same as you, so you will gain points for 'common interest'. Naturally, you are not likely to do this. Still, you should try to provide links of interest to the people that visit your site. Chances are that these will help more than some random sites.

Linking out and bringing people back
As mentioned above, you don't want to lose visitors by linking away from your site. The answer to this problem is to open all outbound links in a new window, so the user still has a browser window on your page. You can do this by setting the target to "blank" as follows:

<a href="www.otherdomain.com" target="_blank">Outbound Link</a>

Do it in AddWeb...

Link Trader
This is possibly the most important feature of AddWeb. The newer versions of AddWeb have an exciting feature called LinkTrader. It is a managed network of thousands of other webmasters using AddWeb, that want to trade links with you. It is a free service for all registered AddWeb customers, which lets you browse through thousands of websites with whom you can request trades. When two potential trading partners accept a trade, AddWeb builds a link page for you to place in your site. From time to time, you can use AddWeb to verify that your trading partners are, in fact linking to you. Remember, if their page is indexed on a search engine, and your link is on it, it can boost your link popularity.

Link Trader also helps you get indexed. If a link page has your link on it, and it gets spidered, chances are that the spider will naturally find your site and list it!

Keep all of the above in mind when selecting trading partners in LinkTrader. Look at their websites before you trade with them, and try to trade with sites that are relevant