Here are two quick reasons:

1. They are “Spider’s Food”!
Links are essential in order to get your new sites spidered by the search engines and get your sites indexed so that they can begin to rank for your target search terms.

After all, you can have the greatest product in the world but if nobody can find it or even knows anything about it, you aren’t going to make any sales!

2. They Help Your Pages Build Relevancy!
Links are a major way search engines determine how relevant your web pages are for search terms. By building links from relevant websites, you are helping ensure your site gets spidered and indexed by the search engines and ranked accordingly.

Building relevant links to your web pages is the number one thing you can do to improve your search engine rankings.

You see, obtaining high search engine rankings is fast becoming not just about having as many links to your site as possible, but having as many quality, relevant links to your site as possible.

Appearing Natural Tip: Find Relevant Links

The first thing you must do when you begin your quest to build links to your website is find relevant websites that will link to you.

How to classify a relevant link is this: the page where your link will appear either mentions your keyword or a synonym to that keyword.

As of right now, it does not appear that Google, Yahoo and MSN are using relevancy in their ranking algorithms but, trust me, they soon will.

So why not start preparing for the coming changes now?

Then when the changes are made, you will be ahead of everyone else – and your rankings will show it!

Here are some more reasons to start building relevant links now:

1. You may actually receive traffic from those links if they are related to the theme of the site they are on.

2. In the future, these links will be viewed by the search engines as more valuable and will make your web pages appear more relevant for your target search terms.

Non Natural Anchor Text
The anchor text is the readable portion of the text that is usually underlined and in blue. Here is the html:

<a href=”http://www.golfclubs.com”>Golf Clubs</a>
The portion that says “Golf Clubs” is the anchor text. This is important because this anchor text is how the search engines determine relevance for search terms. So if I want to rank for “Golf Clubs,” I would need to obtain some links with this in the anchor text.

In order to appear natural you need to ensure you build links using a variety of anchor text. Don’t be afraid to junk up your anchor text a bit. You may find it actually helps you in your rankings.

I would recommend you use your top target keywords as anchor text using some variations with other keyword phrases. Also, throw in some “click here” and some “www.mydomain.com” … this will ensure your links look natural.

In fact, you should come up with a list of anchor text variations that you can rotate through for each of your site’s pages. This will ensure your link portfolio looks as natural as possible to the search engines.