Photo effect (link included) - how do you achieve it?

For that image, it's mostly a matter of finding the right, highly directional, light. With the sun behind you, you should already be close to that image. At the same time, it looks like that photographer might have used a polarizing filter. This kind of filter blocks some of the light spectrum to make skies more striking (uming the light is cooperative). If you wanted to get a polarizer, you'd need to get a circular polarizer that was the right size to fit on your lens. Finally, the photographer probably increased the contrast in an editing software to give it that "pop."