Hi,
A couple of key search engines operate differently than the others, Google is probably the most important, while Yahoos primary results continue to come from its own directories, the secondary results come from Inktomi.
Googles search engine looks at how many sites link to ur site, as a proxy for how popular or interesting your website is and uses the results to rank ur site in its search engine results.
The type of site linking to you is important, a link from a popular site (ie one that has many other linking to it) counts for more than a link from a wallflower site that has few linkers of its own.
Getting a site listed with the major search engines can take a lot of time and effort, don’t ever submit your site to a search engine repeatedly, they are programmed to exclude sites which “spam” them, this can mean:
cloaking: when one page is served to search engine crawlers to get a good ranking but a different version of the page is served to search engine users. Sometimes involves changing of meta tags after positioning
Domain spamming: Identical sites found under different domain names to increase search engine traffic.
Tiny text: overused to hide keyword stuffing
Invisible text: used to hide keyword stuffing by making the stuffed keywords the same colour as the page (white on white, blue on blue etc)
Deceptive title and meta tags: Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags
Deceptive/misleading links: seting up pages/links for the sole purpose of deceiving search engines
Over submitting: using the AddURL form to submit hundreds of deceptive pages.
Sorry for such a long reply but it is very interesting how they work, honest
So to cut a long story short Phil, yes links do help…
Regards
BSF