Links make the World Wide Web go round. Links are how we get from place to place on the web and they're the vehicle that allows us access to an infinite amount of information. Links also give us more traffic to our sites. This article will explain why you should increase the number of links to your site, and how to do it.
It's only logical that the search engines take the number of links pointing to a particular web site into account when ranking the sites in their index. A link to your web site is seen as a vote for your web site. It's a simple concept really. I always like to use the example of a party when explaining the idea of how and why linking works.
We've all been to a party and started, or overheard, a conversation with someone taking about a great product or service. Depending on how much you trust that person, you may or may not buy the product or service, but you will definitely check it out.
Word of mouth advertising is the most effective form of advertising. The idea of linking to other web sites was intended to be the web's form of word of mouth advertising. I say "intended" because in the early days of link exchanging the search engine algorithms could be easily manipulated.
Many web site owners figured out that it was relatively easy to artificially inflate the number of sites that the search engine thought linked to you. This was accomplished in many different ways but the underlying problem was that the sites that were linking to one another had nothing to do with one another.
Let's go back to our party for a minute and let's pretend you and I were in a nice discussion about our yards and the ideas we have to improve the curb appeal of our homes. Then I blurt out, "Hey! You know, I know a great pastry chef who makes killer crème roulette." The look on your face is probably priceless at this point.
That's pretty much what was happening on the Web. Poker sites were linking to diet pill sites and cooking sites would like to car dealers. The fundamental problem with this behavior was that it did not serve the human interests and only catered to the search engine robots.
Thankfully the search engines stepped up and began to recognize that unrelated links not only made the web less organized and more of a mess to navigate but it also diluted the content of web sites and made it more difficult to classify those sites in their index. The position taken by Google and Yahoo! in the early days was a great one in my humble opinion. Who knows what the web would look like to today if they didn't?
Before I begin, it is important to note that a link to your web site can not "hurt" your rankings. Google devalues links but the search engine will not penalize your site for a link that points to your web site.
Link Trading 
/ 16 
