Although some would have you believe that search engine optimization is one of the Internet’s evils, it is in fact seen as necessary by the search engines as it organises the information on web pages to be more clearly readable to their spiders, allowing them to rank websites more effectively.
In basic terms the search engine can only do so using how your page looks & additional information about your site that it can collect using spiders. This additional information consists of what is basically a popularity contest. The more links that you have to your site the higher up the rankings you will be.
In practical terms the search engines use a more complex algorithm than this as they can value each link to your site depending upon several factors such as; the PR value of the site/page that your link is on, the site title, the page title, subtitles & headings on the page, the text in your link, the page that your link is pointed to, whether you link back or not, to name a few.
It is possible to be above a site with 3000 links to it with only 300 ” 400 of your own if they are better, high quality links. As search engines evolve they can rank links on an increasing amount of criteria. This means that it is important for you to aim to add quality links to your site wherever you can. This will have the effect of future proofing your link campaign against any algorithm amendments that may occur in the future.
Ideally, your backlink (the link pointing to your page from another site) should meet the following criteria; the site that the link is on should have a related topic to your site, on a page that has a title that’s similar to your keyword, th actual clickable text of your link needs to be the keyword that you want to be ranked for (this is crucial).
If you can get these links without having to link back to the site with the link on it then so much the better as it would then be a one way link that you had which is considered far more powerful than a reciprocal link where you link to each other.
As the algorithm of the major search engines gets more and more complex, they develop things like trip-filters for if a website gets too many links that all say the same thing (they will penalise this) so you want to change the anchor (clickable) text that you’re using around every fifty links or so.
I would recommend adding a maximum of one hundred link a month to try and stay within the limitations of the search engines. If the links are of a good quality as described, then it should be doing wonders of good for your website.
