Links to a web site play two major roles. Firstly they increase traffic from the site where they are located to the target site. Secondly, they improve a sites’ ranking. If you are able to get to the top rankings of a popular keywords search phrase, it could mean huge free traffic for your site for a long time to come.

If you take a closer look at any high traffic successful web sites, you will immediately notice that they tend to have a very high number of links pointing towards them.



How can you tell the number of links pointing at a site? It is not too difficult to get this kind of information on any web site and there are lots of link detecting tools available. You can for instance use the Google search engine by entering the complete address of the site and then clicking on where it says, “web sites linking to this site," on the next page that comes up. Other tools for measuring the number of links to a site include the Technorati.com site (which specializes on blogs only) and a host of other online tools and available software.



Some webmasters usually work very hard at swapping links with other sites (reciprocal links). This is considered a very inferior kind of link that will only be useful at generating traffic towards your site and will tend to have a very minimal impact on your web sites’ ranking with search engines. This is because search engines are increasingly giving much lower significance or weight to reciprocal links.

Actually what any web site really needs are lots of one way links pointing at it. One of the easiest and fastest ways of getting such links is to actually purchase them through a reputable web site or business that will generate links at various relevant sites, all pointing to your web site.