Why Links Are Vitally Important to the Success of your Website
By Bruce Hearder

The importance of links comes inherently from the structure of the web and how we use it. Imagine that you have just built your site. Absolutely nobody in the world knows about it except you and the people who have helped you build it.
It’s like building a shop in the middle of nowhere; you could be selling gasoline for one cent per gallon and still not have any customers.

The same situation applies to absolutely every site in existence. Links are the bloodlines, which bring traffic to the web and transform something static into a completely interactive experience.

Obviously though not all links are created equal. A genuine interesting link found in the text of a high profile blog will bring more traffic than a link situated on the same page, but on the ad column. This is the most important rule regarding links. Someone will more likely follow a link if the sender is related by topic to it. But this does not apply to content websites alone. Commercial websites can very well follow this guideline and yield better results.

Let’s take an example: consider an online store selling books, now let’s say that from the main page there are two outbound links: one for a site selling book cases and the other one selling man clothing. It is obvious that the book case site will see much more traffic from than the site selling man clothing.

This principle gained importance with the advent of search engines. When presented with an ever-increasing number of sites, the search engines will try to supply the most relevant results. Now this is the point where links show their true importance, because a search engine judges the popularity and thus relevance of a website based not only on its content, but also on the sites that link to it.

As the search engines are the main portals for attracting traffic, link building has become something of an industry and as with all industries there are ethical and non-ethical ways to achieve a high ranking, but this is such a large topic that it deserves an article for itself.

The bottom line is that links are the most important part pf the web. The popularity contest going on right now has a rather unique battlefield and the winners are not always those who you would expect to be. This happens mostly because search engines are still not quite capable to distinguish between genuine, organic links and artificial links, created solely for SEO (search engine optimization) purposes