There are a number of different aspects to that, which include:

- creating pages that offer value to visitors,
- coding pages and sites so that they are easily spidered by search engines,
- presenting information in a manner in which it can be extracted easily and meaningfully by search engines,
- using semantically strong HTML so that meaningful words and phrases that the right people will search for do appear in page titles and headings and content and anchor text.

Linking to other sites, and having them link to you is only part of the whole process. Creating strong business and personal relationships that may sometimes result in referrals, whether by phone or mail or link, is another. The web is just a medium by which people and organizations reach out to others, and it should be part, rather than the whole, of a marketing plan for commercial organizations online.

The web is also more than just a commercial marketplace, but ranking well in search engines often requires more than strong content - it depends upon whether or not people refer to the pages of your site using links. Google’s algorithms strongly rely upon those links, to spider pages, to rank their importance (PageRank), and to understand what the pages are about by looking at the anchor text within those links. Some of the indexing that Google does relies more heavily upon how you format information, such as Q&A, definitions, and local search. But you still need some links to those pages for search engines to find the information.

There are times when pursuing some links to your site can be important. But it isn’t the only effort that one should make.

There can be some value to showing product listings in OneBox results above some Web search results, and news results or images above others. Those appear because people are actually searching for the query terms in Froogle, or Google Image Search, or Google News. The idea is to match the intent of the searcher, and if the search engine thinks that a query might have some commercial intent behind it, they will show some product results.

Blog posts can also often be the most relevant results for many searches, especially since many bloggers know a lot about the fields that they write about.

Looking closely at search results is a great idea.