Of course, you knew that already.
Note, however, that not all incoming links are created equally.
The new search engine climate rewards links that come from and travel to related sites.
It's all about relevance.
Adding incoming links to your blog or website helps to add more visitor traffic, better search engine rankings for your most important keywords, and stronger Google PageRank.
Adding incoming links will help visitors to other sites find yours. That is quite obvious, and doesn't really require much explanation. If possible, along with the name of your blog, have the link contain the topic of your blog to let the visitors know what your blog is all about.
Search engines, and in particular, link obsessed Google love incoming links to a blog or website. The more links your blog has pointing its way, the more important the search engines consider it to be.
That importance is reflected in higher search engine placements when people search for what is also the contents of your blog or traditonal website. Your blog or site will simply be ranked more highly as a result.
Be sure to have some of the links to your blog or site contain your most important keywords and search terms. Technically, this is referred to as link anchor text.
What link anchor text is, in plain language, is the wording that appears on the clickable link itself. The search terms appearing on the clickable link give an extra search engine boost, especially from blogs or websites discussing the same topic as your blog.
Google PageRank is Google's numerical representation of a site's importance on the internet. That importance is solely based on incoming links to a site. The more the better, and the higher their PageRank the better. Remember too, however, that to get their full power, the page sending to your blog must be discussing the same topics as you.
Search engines have gone to relevance and themes.
By that, I mean they reward links from related sites and blogs to the receiving page. Links from unrelated pages simply are not worth nearly as much anymore. The reason for that was to discourage the sale and trading of entirely unrelated links.
For example, a site about flowers exchanging links with a site about polar bears makes little logical sense. The sole purpose of such a link exchange would be to get link benefits from the search engines. With the addition of relevance to their search calculations, that sort of linking is now almost worthless.
One way to ensure your links remain relevant is to think of whether they are of interest to your blog visitors. If you have a blog about horses, links to blogs and websites about horses, animal health, and related topics are what your visitors want to read.
Think of what is relevant to your visitors.
And you won't ever have to worry about what's relevant to the search engines.
