Link popularity is widely regarded now as the dominant factor of search engine rankings. If a competitor’s site is well optimised and has stronger inbound links from reputable, relevant sites, they will rank higher then you. Links act as votes for your site qualifying your content and therefore the major search engines regard a site with good quality back links better than a site without.
Search engine optimisation is a highly competitive industry and in order to be successful you must be ahead of your competitors. Link popularity has the means to make or break your SEO campaign. A site must offer good quality, relevant content to act as link bait to encourage other sites to link to your site otherwise sites with genuine authority are unlikely to deem your site worthy of a back link as it is there reputation at stake associating themselves with you.
Link building is a virtuous circle, the higher your search engine ranking, the more sites will link to you.
Website content is obviously key, however if the search engine can’t find your content, your site will not rank well. Links act as portals for the web-based crawlers to travel through, the fewer back links, the less likely the search engine robots will find your website.
Relevance
Search engines search for relevance to a searchers query. Make sure that the sites that link to your site are relevant otherwise search engines may think your links are spammy. Google Panda was designed to penalise sites that have a lot of spammy links.
Authority
The best links are those that come from authority sites. The higher the authority, the more the link is worth. Not only does high authority links reduce the number of links that you have to build but they are also much safer. A site with a lot of low quality links looks very spammy and risks getting penalised.
Links must look natural
Google believes that building links is unethical and thinks that if you write good quality content, sites will automatically link to you. While link bait is great and definitely the best way of building links, link bait is not always possible and therefore you have to build links in other ways. When doing this though, you must ensure that you link profile looks natural.