One thing has become abundantly clear in today's Internet: you need to place well in the search engines if you want to succeed with your online business. Every search engine ranks pages based on slightly different criteria, but one that is consistently critical is the number of incoming links lead to your page.

Google especially focused its original algorithms on these links. Their idea was that if your page has lots of incoming links from pages in or related to your keyword topic, and if those links originated from good or prestigious pages, this was an indicator that your page was likely to hold the information that their search engine customers were seeking. Rankings were based on the number of incoming links a given page had.

Today, Google works on the same concept, but they've grown increasingly sophisticated to serve their customers better. For instance, when affiliate marketers figured out that Google was using linking to drive search engine placement, they started building automated link-generating sites that cross-referenced one another through complex linking arrays. This quickly became known as search engine spam.

How Can You Use Links?

First, never spam Google. They may blackball all your sites and your name if they think you've done something contrary to their terms of use. Instead, focus on how you can get good quality links from other pages to your website.

Great Content: Great content, once the word gets out, will always draw links from other sites to you. If you have a fantastic tool or resource to share, putting it online can draw links and ultimately traffic.

Links From Directories: Yahoo! and Dmoz are well-known directory sites; instead of cataloging pages via web spiders, these directories have you or an editor place your site into an appropriate category, from which your link will emerge. Always register your site with directories yourself so you can select a category appropriate to your keywords. Don't overlook niche directories, either; whether your website is focused on pets or datachips, there are small specialized directories out there you can register with. Note: register with free directories first, and when you see where your site's going to fall in the search engine you can start looking at the paid ones.

Links from Related Forums: If you post in a forum related to your website topic, always include a link back to your website; the spiders pick up these links and, when they're from related forums, it will boost your website's ranking.

Reciprocal Links: Historically, these have been great, a sort of tit-for-tat web marketing scheme. Lately, after the latest update on Google , they've been reduce in importance, though they are still valuable.

Article Sites: There are numerous websites that distribute free donated articles written by experts. If you write good articles, you can contribute articles to these sites. The benefit? Each article is printed on content-rich sites with a resource box that has your name and a link to your website in it. This provides you with an automatic one-way link from a quality site.

Blogs: Blogs are a little different, in that they don't necessarily give you one-way links. What they do is provide your site with continually fresh content an online commodity that the search engines love. With good one-way links and fresh content, you can raise your search engine rankings quickly.