First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and the three factors that matter most are…

1. The address which it links to
2. The text of the link
3. The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one-by-one. First, you’ll want the link to link to your blog. But to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to have all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to keep keywords in mind when linking with other blogs.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. This is basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on http://www.google.com/technology/. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. From an SEO standpoint, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different than a PageRank of zero) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of zero. Then, depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will eventually rise.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enabling search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank your blog higher in search engine results.