Apart from being valuable with regard to search engines linking also helps establish you as an expert in your field, by linking to relevant content on other sites It shows that you are well read in the area of your expertise. Linking in this manner is more or less similar to placing references to other people's work. In fact, it has been argued that by placing their materials on the Internet (without stating expressly their objection to external links), copyright owners grant 'implied licenses to other users to link to them. As the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee points out, there is no reason to have to ask for permission to link to other documents. Sites still need back links to rank high in SERP. (SERP or Search engine results page is the result returned when searching a key word. ) For speed o development, buying links from high ranking sites is an option. This is an expensive method and I don't recommend it unless you have a large buget. However you may have no alternative for building fast quality links unless you can offer high value information on your website so that people will not mind adding a link to your site.

Search engines, particularly Google, use link popularity to help evaluate and rank your website. Link popularity refers to the number, quality and relevance of inbound links from other websites to yours. the search engines count the number of incoming links and the linking sites page rank when they calculate your ranking Eg. page rank, the more links a website has the better, but the quality I think is more important than the amount. which may explain why you may appear at position 123 while your competitor appears on page 1. The more page rank a linking page has the more authority it lends to you If you use a reciprocal linking service you are probably wasting your time, the sites that you are linked too are from too wide a range of subjects to have any relevance or authority.

Another factor to consider is deep linking, where the in coming link goes directly to an internal page rather than your home page. For example you may have an article that is on yoursite .com /articles/ happydays.html A link from an outside site direct to that page would be deep linking as it is on the third layer of your site. Deep linking is good for your site as the overall page rank takes into account not only the links to your home page but also the total links to the site.

Google has become skilled at detecting un-natural linking patterns; links to a website whose only purpose is to improve Google ranking. Because of this many SEO experts are going back to fundamentals and using techniques like article writing to develop natural links What is a natural link ? It is an incoming link, it is not recipricol, and it has value (pagerank). If you build enough quality and relevant links to your site you're site will still have traffic before, during, and after algorithm changes.