Why Links Matter
Google no longer publicly discloses the number of pages it has ranking, but the estimate is now over 1 trillion pages¹ (1,000,000,000). That is an incomprehensible number to imagine. So getting your site at the top of the food chain is not only important, it's urgent! How can you be competitive with that many other sites out there?
By creating a site that is informative to the visitor AND has supporting qualities that aid automated readers (search engines and disability assisting tools). Links, Alt-tags on photos, Title, Keywords, Descriptions, as well as text content are needed for search engines to be able to pick up your site and in Google's case, filter out the other non-related sites so that yours is chosen when a user enters a search query.
Links are those 'connections' that users click on to go somewhere on a site. They can come in a variety of forms, images, buttons, text, even CSS regions. Still there are two major categories of links: Internal and External (or 'inbound').
Internal links are those links on your site that refer to anther page of your own site or domain. These navigate through your site. Search engines use these to index pages that are on your site.
External or inbound link are links that other sites (not your domain) link to you. A search engine that is crawling THAT other site, will see the link to your site and sip off to your site as well. The more external links your site has, the more potential for user traffic to come to your site and the more potential for search engines to revisit your site. In Google's case, the larger the number external links a site has, the more popular Google considers it to be. Thus, the higher ranking it is likely to get.
For more information on Google Link philosophy, You may want to visit Google's Blog 'Straight From the Source' material:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/links-information-straight-from-source.html
Using Aiken Buzz to Create a consistent external Link program to your site can aid in boosting your site's ranking across all search engines!
Footnotes:
1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html, July 2008