Links are the currency of the web.  A link to your website from another site is more or less the equivalent to a positive referral from that entity to your business or personal blog.  Not only can this link potentially direct traffic from the referring site to your site, but it can also increase your credibility on a Google search.  Even though Google continues to add various filters and complexities to their query process two fundamentals still hold true:

1) Google uses their patented PageRank link analysis algorithm (check out the patent) to determine how credible a website is in relation to other websites

2) Google analyzes every viewable word on a site and does a keyword match to your query

You can read more about this here: Google Technology Overview

What does all of this mean to you and what can you do to improve the performance of your website today?  First, as always, I recommend you analyze the content on your site and ensure it focuses on topics that are valuable to your target audience.  Second, create a link-building strategy to increase your reach across the internet.  In order to start linking partner sites to your site you should first determine who is currently linking to you, as well as, who is currently linking to your competitors.  You can do this by simply going to Google and typing in link:your url, for example if I wanted to see who is linking to www.Arkayne.com I would type the following into Google link:www.arkayne.com and the following appears:

As you can see above Google returned 48 URLs that link directly to www.arkayne.com.  This is valuable information, it not only tells you how many incoming links you have to your website but it also tells you exactly which pages/websites link to you.  I recommend running through this exercise using your major competitors URLs as well.

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