Links from other sites are beneficial. Link is a reference, which means that somebody considers your site authoritative.
Search engines tend to rank authoritative sites higher.
If a site is useful, people start reference to it.
The more links a site have, the more authoritative it is. The more authoritative sites link to a site, the better for the site.
Where can a (young) web site get links if the webmaster wants to get more links?
- Manyally insert links to your site to comments, forums etc.
- Pay other webmaster to publish a link on your web site (expensive and “a black hat SEO trick”).
- Build your own private blog network (“a black hat SEO trick”).
How a link looks like:
<a href=”http://www.example.com”>Example Anchor Text</a>
Natural links usually:
- One third of them are anchorless.
- Half of them have rel=”nofollow”. Nofollow means a signal to search engines not to concider it as reference.
- About one third of links to a site reference to its home page.
- Links whose ancor contains exact key phrase are rather rare. Usually it is an arbitrary variation of key phrase.