If content is king, then linking is the queen that shares his throne. We have all heard about adding content to your site to give the search engines fodder to consume. But the secret to luring the search engines is the links to your site. Today's search engines look very carefully and critically at who is linking to you, and what it is that they are saying about you. A link from a leader in your industry carries a lot of weight and means that your site is important. Two links from industry leaders means your site is even more important. 100 links from random web sites, from industries you are not even related with, means almost nothing. Thus, getting links is only the start; the important thing is getting good links from quality web sites.

Why do links matter?

Since the arrival of Google and their PageRank, search engines have put a lot of weight on links to a site. There used to be simple ways to get good rankings: Meta tags, titles, keyword density, etc