In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a phrase that often comes to mind is "Content is King and Links are Queen".  We are seeing some trends that indicate we should switch this around and consider Links as King.  Nevertheless, it's really hard to win the internet marketing and rankings battle without an aggressive link building campaign.  The search engines consider incoming links to your website as a "vote" of your popularity or importance.  The more "votes" coming to your site from other websites, the more important you become. 

Getting a vote from a very important website, counts much more than a link from a website that's less prominent from the search engine's perspective.  For example, a link from our website (www.webstrategiesinc.com), which has a Google Page Rank of 4, has much more impact than a link from a less prominent website.  In other words, a link from our website is approximately four times more powerful than a link from a website that has a Google Page Rank of 1.  It's not exactly this simple, but it's a way to think about the impact of links from other sites.     

It's critical to make sure your content is rich and optimized.  But if you really want to get ranked in the top 5 for search terms that have good frequency, you better charge up your link building activities.