Google is the king of search engines as of now. It might change tomorrow but today they are undisputed leader. Yahoo and MSN might be bringing out variety results of late but their problem mainly is lack of speed. Lack of speed in showing results and well as in indexing new content quickly.

By the time you put up a new page on the net, Google is the first one to see it and index it. It is much later when yahoo and MSN take a look at the new arrival.

Google gives lot of wait to the incoming links to your site. In fact Google is said to give the prime importance to this factor in ranking a site.

Importance of those links:

It is not only the number of links; it is also the importance of the site linking into you that’s important. If cnn.com or nytimes.com links to you, Google assumes you are important and gives you good ranks. If it is some unknown small site linking into you, you don’t gain much but still gain some weight from it.

However understand that getting linked by other sites is very critical. Try to gain a lot of links by others. There is an easy way to achieve this. That’s creating a great site! Whether it is for selling products or other purpose like portals etc, a good site will go a long way in getting linked by others. Then you receive better ranks without much effort.

Other options are to write to other sites to link back to you. Knowledgeable webmasters will acknowledge the importance and take it seriously. However it requires lot of efforts to get linked by many.

What is relevance?

Relevance is the determination of the relation of the site you are linking to with your site's content. It is the finding of the reason why one website is linked to another.

If you are an car maker and if you are linked from a human anatomy website it is considered with the least or no importance by the engines. However if you received a link from another car maker it is considered more relevant and hence you receive better points for such a link. These days there are so many link exchange programs and hence search engines will carefully analyze the reason as to why one website is linked to or received links from another.