Link Building &
Google was the first system to rate web-sites not only by content but also according to the number of other sites that linked to them. Each link was seen as a "vote" for the other site, their system grew from being 'quite popular' to what it is today.
What links ?
Yahoo Site Explorer lets you see your incoming links and those of your competitors, useful to find sources of links you might benefit from, check their ranking with the Google toolbar and focus more on the ones with a higher page rank.
Page Rank (PR)
Googles ranking system puts site's in bands, an incoming link from a higher ranking site may be seen as a bigger "vote" often referred to as a site's "PR".
The Google Toolbar has it's page rank reporting facility built in, it's not enabled by default, you'll need to do that in the options and agree to send your own site visiting stats back to Google so you might prefer to install it on a secondary browser. The Pagerank data isn't updated that often so don't worry unduly about your own sites rank, these things take time (many months).
Relevance
Generally, all incoming links are a good thing but they are even better from relevant sites. For example, if you sell Tractors, a link from a forum which discusses crops is much better than one from a gardening site, plus it'll bring some relevant traffic too !
Natural links
If you provide some really useful information on your site, like how to mend Tractors for example, people will create the links for you ! Having read your mender's guide, when someone else, say in a forum, on facebook or in their blog has a similar problem they may well post a link to your guide. These kind of links are more in keeping with Google's original ethos.
How to construct your links - The Anchor Text
This is a bit technical and not always an option but if you can make your link look like this: tractors for sale in the UK rather than this:
http://www.mascus.co.uk/Agriculture/Used-Tractors then even better. In the 1st example the "anchor text" is "tractors for sale in the uk" the text is a link, Google see's it as more important and it's relevant.
Our IP-to-Country database contains a match for your ip address: 38.107.179.238
You are located in UNITED STATES, and your country code is US.
