Links are very important tools for determination of your website's success. But why is it so? How can you encourage people to link to your site? Let us see why links are so important.

Links
In the early days of web, the only way to reach a web address was to follow links. Eventually, directories were built for links such as the Yahoo directory. These directories started to act as the web's gateways.

In the later years, the reliance on links shifted to the search. There was no need to go to the link directory anymore. The users could easily find what they were looking for with the use of the search engines. This gave rise to a web where the dependency on links was substantially reduced. All the big link directories soon transformed into search engines.

PageRank
Page Rank was invented by Google to make the search engines to pay attention to links. Popularity was now a criteria for the determination of the search engine ranking for a site. This meant that the website's ranking was now influenced by the number of links that pointed to it. This changed the way the web worked to a large extent. The users now had an easy access to the search engines that followed the links for them and they could find the one most suitable for them.

How is it important?
All you have to be concerned with is the number of websites that link to you as this is what determines your ranking in the search engine. Once your site becomes popular, you can also send sponsored links to people who are trying to improve their search engine rankings.

However, you must always keep in mind the traditional uses of links. A popular site's link will obviously get more traffic. You must not change your URL system without the addition of redirects to avoid breakage of people's links.

How to make people link to my site?
There are some people who use methods such as sending a URL to thousands of people with a message 'I'll link to you if you link to me'. However, such methods should not be used as they are regarded as Spam.

A good way is to involve yourself with user groups and forums and interact with people with the use of  websites like yours. This means that you have to make friends and always be willing to link to their sites and not just to make them link to you. There are good chances that they will do the same for you.

However, you always remember that all the sites are different in terms of rankings and traffic. A link from high ranked sites improves your ranking much more as compared to the less ranked ones.