Years ago, certain tactics, such as, simply adding lists of keywords to meta tags and title tags, would have achieved great rankings in the search engine results depending on the keywords and level of competition. Today, a major factor in helping your pages rank well has nothing to do with keywords. It is the links that point to your site.

One of the things that search engines come across as they catalog web pages is links that appear on web pages. As a result, search engines can measure how many links there are for each page in its database.

Search engines use link measurement to quantify how good a page is by how many links are pointing to it. The link measurement factor also takes into account the link measurement of the site that is linking to that page. This is known as “link popularity.” Google’s version of this is called PageRank. Here is how Google defines it.

Google counts the number of votes a page receives to determine its PageRank, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In other words, search engines will consider the importance of pages based on how many links they have.

It is important for the site that links to you to be topically related your site. A link from another site in your field or a similar field counts more than a site which is totally unrelated. So, although no link can hurt, it should be from a site that has obtained a lot of links and is topically related. The best advice is to seek links from sites related to yours that are considered authorities and have lots of links. These sites are sometimes called hubs.

Search engines also look at the text that is contained in the links. Text within external links helps search engines understand what your site is about in someone else’s words. So, make sure keywords appear in the link text whenever possible.

The best kind of link is not on a page with a list of other links. The ideal place for a link is in the middle of a sentence with descriptive keywords in the text. This kind of link will have the most value for your site.

An additional benefit of links is they can generate traffic in addition to the search engines. There are plenty of sites out there that get more traffic from high visibility links than from search engines. For example, if Site A gets a lot of traffic, Site B will get traffic as well because visitors from Site A may choose to visit Site B when they see the link from Site A.

Obtaining links for your site is not easy. You can sit back and wait or, you can go and find related sites and ask for links. The latter is time consuming and not very exciting. But, the hard work will pay off in the links your site receives. When a site has lots of quality links, it will be able to better outrank the sites that don’t have as many links. Plus, all those links generate traffic on their own. Getting links is an essential part of today’s search engine optimization.