Everyone including me desires to attain a substantial link popularity for our domains. But I not interested in creating another search directory like Dmoz or yahoo.
What I do is selecting the right website through some quality analysis. I am sure you know that, not quantity but quality is best for building link popularity.
How can we analyze the quality of a website for exchanging links?
1) check whether the proposed website contents related/thematic to yours
2) check the Google PageRank of their homepage
3) check their domain age
4) check how many links in the proposed link page
5) check structure of their links page (Whether it is link farms or not)
6) check how many links in a page of their link exchange section
7) check class C IP (For checking whether you already exchanged links with this IP)
Remember, one-way link is the top most method for achieving site popularity.