Why do search engines look for "inbound links" for ranking websites?

Dear friends, ranking high at the search engines for a keyword which has high demand is every marketers dream. No matter what your website about, a fully loaded super store or a hobby site, you need traffic and search engines have a capacity to provide an unending supply of thousands of visitors (if your niche has that much demand) at zero cost. Actually it would be wrong if we say that search engines send traffic at zero cost. There is a price you need to pay to rank high and that's TIME. Yes, it takes time to reach there. (especially at Google) there are many factors that undergo a normal Search Engine Optimization exercise and building "inbound links" is considered one of the most challenging tasks involved today. To understand better why search engines look for inbound links, let's take a real life example. For a moment forget the Internet, forget you website/search engines anything that has to do "ranking high", just read this small story. There was a young boy Jim, about 21 years old. He was a fantastic painter. He painted in water colors on canvas. His favorite subjects were landscapes, natural beauty, mountains, etc...He could spend hours painting and playing with colors. Colors were his passion, his life. He lived in a small village that was away from a major metro city. With a small population, no one really visited this village very often. Jim was very happy with his passion of painting. One day Jim's uncle visited his home on a Sunday. When he saw Jim's paintings he thought Jim has got an inborn talent of colors, of looking towards the surrounding beauty that he was able to capture on canvas. His was a special skill that very few people have. So he suggested Jim to move to the city to display his work to people out there. Jim assured him that whenever he gets the opportunity he would definitely make the best of it. Then the golden day arrived. Jim was listening to a radio station, when he heard the announcement of an exhibiting of paintings to be held in the metro city. Jim thought this is what I was looking for an quickly rushed to the city at his Uncle's place to arrange for the formalities. Five of Jim's paintings got selected and displayed at the metro city exhibition. He got a tons of post and is still getting from his fans and now the best part is he is making thousands of bucks just from a single painting. He is happy and wealthy too. His passion is keeping satisfied and now he is famous guy. The villagers are proud of having him in their village. OK... now what's this story got to do with SEO..you ask.. A lot...If you read the story again you will discover that Jim is already happy when he is in his village, spending most of his time with paints and brushes. But when he displays his work out to public, his work is admired by more and more people. It has to do with "numbers". Again when no one knew about his talents, he still was a great painter, but now because now thousands of people say that "Jim is a great painter" his value becomes magnified thousands of times. Now if Jim launches his website on water color paintings where do you think it must rank.. You see, it's a numbers game. Of course it's also important that who recommends Jim as a great painter. But Jim doesn't care, he's already taken all the care for years polishing his painting skills. All he knows is producing great quality paintings for his customers which are ready to pay him truckloads of money. There is a simple exercise to do. Put yourself in Google's shoes, imagine that you are Google.com [:-)] and then look at Jim's new website. If I am a regular Google user I will take all the care to see that my search results for the keyword "water color paintings" show up results that are best and most importantly recognized by experts in the art industry. This is true for every search engine out there, including Yahoo! and MSN, because they want to retain their users. Here "inbounds links" come into picture. The number and the quality of inbound links is the only way for the search engines to recognize the quality of the website it is supposed to rank. Of course as I mentioned there are many factors that a search engine will look for, but inbound links can have a major impact on your rankings. Again if Jim wants his website to rank well for many years to come, he will have to keep on producing quality work just the way he is doing now. Most people think that search engines are money machines, just build a website, get is indexed and forget about it. But it is getting a long term goal now a days to rank high at the search engines. As I said it comes at the cost of TIME. If you are ready to go for it, creating traffic through search engines will be one of the most profitable skills you will ever learn in this lifetime. I hope this article was useful.... Copyright 2005 Shrinivas Vaidya