It is a well known fact in the world of webmasters that you need lots of links in order to rank well in the search engine results pages. But no all links are worth the same, you can have 3000 links and rank higher than someone with 20,000 if your links are from sites of a better quality.
There are many factors to take into account when trying to work out how much a link will be worth, but it can pretty much be summed up by the Page Rank that Google has given the page that you want a link from.
Basically, Google ranks every page it comes across (not straight away, they review it every 6 months or so) from zero to ten. Zero being the lowest, and ten of course being the highest. There are pages that Google doesnt rank that will have Page Rank (PR) n/a, this will most likely mean that Google has not found that page yet, or it is an insignificant page deep within a site, or it could mean that Google doesnt like that site and could have blacklisted it. You will very rarely see a PR 10 site (apart from google.com) as there are only about 8 in the world.
So what is there to gain from a good PR? Well, if your site receives a link from a high PR site like a PR 7 or 8, then it will massively more beneficial than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. In essence, what PR is, is how valuable and genuine Google considers the content of your page to be on a scale of 0-10. Each link counts as a vote for the integrity of the page it is linking to, and so if a PR 8 page votes for you then Google concludes that your page must be of high value, because a high value site says it is, and it will therefore push you further up the results rankings.
PR is sometimes misunderstood by webmasters in that they believe that if they have a higher PR, they will rank better in the search engines. This is not true, but a high PR will give you a MUCH better basis for climbing the rankings. Once you start accumulating some reasonably good PR, you will find that lots of people want to get links from you. This will allow you to ask for higher quality links back as the link you will be giving them will be of a high quality.
The catch 22 of the whole PR game is that in order to get good PR, the main thing you need, is high quality links, but until you have a high PR page yourself, other high PR sites will be unwilling to link to you, and so thats where you have to apply a bit of knowledge.
A good method to start off with is to find some sites that are in the same position as yourself (with related themes to yours if possible, but I wouldnt worry too much about that) i.e. they are looking to build some PR by getting lots of links, and exchange links with these sites. Then (provided these sites have kept their efforts up) in 6 months to a years time, these sites will have some PR, and will still be linking to you, therefore you will have some PR by then, making these initial link exchanges mutually beneficial.
There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.
The reason for this is that if the content on a site stays the same for a year, then Google sees it as old information that isnt necessarily relevant any more. Google wants to provide its searchers with the best, most relevant and up to date information as to what they are looking for. If you always bear this in mind then you should end up with a high PR site.
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