Who links to you? This is what determines your link popularity.
What do these links say about you? This is what determines your link Reputation.

The text used to describe a link helps the search engines determine the topic of the page and helps the page get ranked for that specific search term. If the click-able link (anchor text) contains a targeted keyword or then the search engines will looked upon that link more "favorable" because it is seen as being more relevant. The number of links are important for building your popularity but it is the theme or topic of the links which is even more important. Having links pointing to you from pages with the same theme or topic as yours, will cause your website to be seen as being more "important" then a website with just has bunch of links from random pages.

If your site is a gift basket site and a car dealer with a popular site links to you from their service department page then the link will do very little for you. However, if this same car dealer has a page that is about gifting the link not only helps your popularity but it will also help your reputation.

A good example of how all of this works can be demonstrated by going to goggle and searching for the term "miserable failure".
       Click here to re-create the search.

The site that comes up on top is the bio of none other than President George W Bush. The second listing is the web site of film maker Michael Moorer. Of course, President Bush does not have the words miserable failure anywhere on his biography page. However, this proves the power of the anchor text in being able to determine the topic of a page. Because the bio page has thousands of links pointing to it, it is very popular.

Because thousands of inbound links use the anchor text "miserable failure" the anchor text passes miserable failure on as the pages reputation. This is why it is so important to use the keyword phrase that you "absolutely" have to be found in the search engine results pages by your prospects and customers. This keyword phrase is called "anchor text" and is the actual link that can be clicked on to bring you to a page.