Many search engines use the number and type
of links pointing into a website as a measure of its importance. Because of this, links from other sites to yours are really important and the more good quality links that you can acquire the better will be the chance of your site appearing near the top of the first page of search results.
This approach was pioneered by Google as part of its ranking criteria to enable more established sites to perform well and to make it harder for new, or temporary sites, to manipulate the results. As a result, the need to develop links into a site can mean that new sites will initially find it hard to obtain rankings, particularly for the most competitive terms, whereas the likes of eBay, Amazon and the BBC can dominate the results.
Some companies
will try to artificially inflate links into a domain by creating 'link farms'
between many unrelated sites but this is dangerous territory because Google has been known to penalise sites that use them and this can mean that your site simply disappears from results. And never respond to approaches from companies or individuals who offer to submit your site to hundreds of search engines and guarantee you a better position. Many will be link farms and some will be acquiring email addresses for spammers. The simple truth is that genuine links
are difficult to establish effectively and resorting to artificial work-arounds
like link farms can actually be detrimental because several search engines penalise
sites that do this. A site with good content and high awareness will attract links
naturally and most will need to build links as part of a long-term strategy.
Links should point to the direct domain of the recipient site and they should also be placed on other well-established or relevant sites. Preferably, the page content should be related to the subject of the linked site and, ideally, the link should be in the form of a text link, rather than graphic, with the text itself including a relevant keyword or phrase.