Inbound links (quality and quantity)
Coming in at #3 in our list of search engine ranking factors is inbound links to your website. Why are inbound links so important in the search engine ranking algorithms? Because they can indicate a page’s quality, popularity, or status on the Web and site owners have very little control over their own inbound links. (Being off-page factors, inbound links can be influenced only indirectly.) Links with the most rank-boosting power are links from a home page (as opposed to links from pages buried deep within the site) and links from authority pages in the topical community, meaning pages with their own collection of fabulous inbound links from other websites covering the same topic. The same quality factors hold true for
links coming from within your site.
Inbound link anchor text that the way other websites refer to your website is one of the ways that search engines understand your content. Anchor text, also called linking text, is the text that is “clickable” on the Web, and it is an important factor in search ranking algorithms. Anchor text that contains your page’s targeted keywords can help boost your page’s ranks. Combining this keyword-rich anchor text with relevant text surrounding the link can amplify this good effect.