Every link to your site from an external web site is in its simplest form a vote in your sites favour. The context of the text that the link has been placed in may not always be positive, but from a SEO point of view, any inbound link to your web site from another web site is normally a good thing.

The search engine bots that crawl the Internet looking at web sites and analysing their content consider a link from one web site to another as a recommendation, much like in the real world when a person verbally tells another person about a product or service. The more people who talk about a company, their product or service, in essence the more important that company, product or service is deemed as being. Putting aside that in the real world a person could actually be bad-mouthing a company, the generated hype is seen as positive from the subject’s point of view as it generates interest in them and if you heard lots of people talking about something, you’d probably consider it interesting too. The job of the search engines is to promote links to web sites that are considered relevant and interesting, for good or bad reasons (within reason), to a topic. They see and interpret such cyber chit-chat (linking) much like us humans hear and appreciate buzz around a subject in day-to-day life.

Whether your site is ranking top of the search engine results pages or not, inbound links are good for a number of reasons, including:

1. The vote system talked about above. Whether you are top of the pile or not, a link to your site is generally a vote in your favour. If you are top of the search engine results pages for a particular term, a link will simply help to reinforce your dominance. If you are some way down, the extra link should help to boost your position a little.
2. Even if the search engines don’t consider the vote very worthy, a link is a link and when it comes from another web site, it is extra exposure of your web site on another web site from a human perspective. You never know how well another page ranks for a particular search term and who is looking at it, so if that page is popular in its own right and a user sees your link they might click on it. SEO is not just about ranking high on search engine results pages, it is about increasing traffic to your site over all, never forget that.

We know that inbound links from external web sites are important for at least two reasons, but just who is linking to you and more importantly, who is linking to your competitors?

A useful took that I use is the Yahoo! Site Explorer. By entering in the URL of any web site on the Internet, be it yours or that of your competitors, you can quickly and easily get an idea of who is linking to the web site. By then visiting the sites that link to your competitors, you can gauge whether or not they are suitable sites to link to your site. It may be that some inbound links to a competitor’s site come from a subsidiary company web site or the web site of a friend. Naturally you’d be hard pressed to get a link from them, but this practice of link exploration often reveals suitable directories and on-topic web sites on the Internet that you may not previously have known about. Links from such new found sources are a great way of generating traffic to your site, either directly or indirectly. The more on-topic or respected the site linking to you is, the better.

Link building is not something that can be rushed. Not only can it take a long time to find suitable sources for links, but it may be the case that a sudden, sharp increase of links to your site may be considered by the search engines as a little suspicious, especially if you’re not receiving links from more of the well respected web sites on the Internet. Arousing such suspicion may result in a small penalisation, but that’s not a known. Nevertheless, a slow and steady approach should be adopted to keep things real.