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Internet Marketing Guides » SEO Tips » Rising Tides: An Inbound Link Story
Links are the glue that hold the web together, without them, the web would be nothing more than a wasteland of pages no one would find (or in the case that a search engine or two existed, a much tougher environment to find what you needed). Links act as the social bond between information, sources and inspirations, all of which operate similarly to the rules in the offline world. One major difference of course is access. In society, we've got classes and different layers of accomplishment, however online, anyone can be anything and class plus those layers of society can be stripped away leaving the core essential person and what they bring to the table.
With search engine optimization, the goal of links plays into gaining rankings on search engines - thus the importance placed on developing linking strategies. Each link gained to a website (of course each link's contribution value differs vastly on the quality of the site, quality of the content, link text and stature for rankings to name a few) adds a boost to the linked-to-site through the many proprietary algorithms of the search engines. These boosts can certainly be considered "votes" for the website and the more votes, the more likely a site is able to rank well for terms that are breadwinners or valuable to site operators/owners or marketers.
So in essence, with information architecture covered, technology issues resolved and basic site-side SEO implemented, each link coming back to your website "rises the tide" and ensures that other indexed quality pages of your website are accounted for and potentially given a boost by search engines both for rank position, as well as rank quantity. Rank quantity simply means that additional tail terms ("the long tail) will likely grow with the introduction of new links and better positioning.