The single most important factor that affects a website's rank are backlinks
. Good backlinks to your site will make people trust your site and consider it an authority. In simple language this means your website is being recommended by other sites. More "votes" increase visibility, resulting in increased findability by those who are looking for the kinds of products and services you offer! Not only does the quantity of backlinks matter but it's more of their quality. And, the more pages with relevant, quality links you have on your site, the more likely you are to be found!
Also, links give your site referral traffic because it will be within the community of relevant websites.
A very important aspect of website popularity comes from link building. A website is ranked high on the search engines if it has many good backlinks.
You need to spend lots of time to get potential links to your website. The time and patience that you put into your backlinking efforts will eventually give you good benefits. I'm sure you have come across websites which are ranked high on search engines in spite of their poor content. This could be accomplished by the support of the links that they have in their website.
There are few steps that has to be taken care of while building links to your website.
* Post comments in forums and include your website URL. *Make links only to relevant topics based on your website. * Submit content to directories to get backlinks from them. * If it's possible, try to link even to your competitor sites. * Take care that the themes of your domains are related to your website content. * Post relevant testimonials on related websites; this will encourage their readers to link back to your site. * You need the links coming from your affiliates; they will help boost your rank. * Attempt to write articles about products and services; they are a good way to get backlinks.
You can analyze the links that point back to your site using a backlink analysis tool. A backlink analysis tool will give you an idea of what links your competitors have and compare yours with them.