It is a well-known fact, for example, that links coming from blogs are especially helpful in improving your rankings. What most people don’t know is why exactly that is the case.

One must realize that one of the most powerful types of link exchanges known to man is a site-wide sidebar exchange between two blogs, also known as a blogroll exchange. Such an arrangement, in effect, creates the potential for each party to receive hundreds (or even thousands) of relevant backlinks. This is due to the fact that each and every page of Site A links to the homepage of Site B, and vice versa. As you can see, an exchange like this between two very large sites can be of great benefit to both of them.

Another much smaller scale type of blog link is a simple reference from another post. These usually aren’t part of a reciprocal agreement, and might at first glance, appear to be quite minor. In truth, however, these links carry a lot of weight, due to their high level of relevance.

I mean, think about it for a minute. Most bloggers won’t link to another post unless it’s clearly related to what they’re writing about. And links from highly relevant content-based pages are going to be valuable assets, regardless of pagerank, etc.

So, having read my overwhelmingly positive description of blog links, you may be anxious to get out there and acquire a few for a blog of your own. It’s important to realize, however, that in order to receive favorable results, you will need to have a good base of quality unique content.

My advice would be to continually write relevant and useful content, while submitting to RSS directories, etc. If people read your material and find it useful, some of them will likely link to it, and that’s where the fun begins.

As you publish more content and get more links, you will eventually become a trusted source within your industry. At that point, you should start contacting the owners of related sites, and politely asking for blogroll exchanges. As you amass such exchanges, you will notice your search engine ranking (and traffic) slowly but steadily move upwards, to previously unattainable levels.

Just remember the basic theory behind it though. Quality content comes first, then links will begin to form naturally. For those who have knowledge, and are willing to work to articulate it, blogs are perhaps the easiest medium to express ideas, and attain backlinks.

The first thing you need to do is open up a search engine (Yahoo is usually best for this purpose), and perform a search for your keyword of choice. As with any search term, you’ll see the current top ten results for that term.

Now, copy the URL of the first result, and paste it into the search bar with “link:” before it (e.g. link:http://www.example.com). This is the best way of seeing how many incoming links a website has.

When you hit search, you will see a list of all the sites linking to the URL that is currently first for your search term. At the top of the page, the total number of links will be displayed.

Now you need to ask yourself: “Can I compete with that?” If you are an amateur webmaster, and the top result has 100,000 backlinks, the answer to this is likely no, and you should move on to another term. If on the other hand, the top ranking has only a few backlinks, and the term gets a relatively high number of searches (check searches here); you might have found yourself a really good niche.

If you want to research a keyword further, you can also look at the incoming links for some of the other results on the first page as well. In general, however, it is best to try and find niche terms that you have a chance of ranking number one for.

Of course, the other part of the formula is that the more incoming links that a site linking to you has, the more it will benefit your ranking.

The original theory behind this formula was the Pagerank system, developed by Google in the late 1990’s. Google still uses an evolved version of this system, and many other other search engines, including MSN and Yahoo use similar formulas of their own.

Because of the popularity of this “more links = higher ranking” system among search engines, it is completely safe to say that when it comes to getting a better ranking, links really are power.