LIKE some mutant version of Oliver Twist, businesses and individuals frequently contact other websites and bloggers and ask, "Please sir, can I have some links?" Links are the currency on the web now and without links, your website will be lost to the world.

The worldwide web, like a spider web, comprises hundreds or even billions of strands connecting one part of it to another. In worldwide web terms, these are called links. The more links you have, the more influential your website will be online. Like everything else, too many links can also be bad for you if you don't properly plan for them.

The web turns 17 this year and it is perhaps no surprise that this maturing into adulthood is reflected in a web traffic survey from Hitwise which shows that web users are paying less attention to online sex sites every year and are instead spending more of their web time using search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Websites can be a cheap way of generating extra customers for your business but getting your business found online is no easy feat when you are competing with millions of other websites and billions of other web pages.

Getting your business found in the yellow pages may be easy, but getting yourself found on the web is much harder. There are too many websites and too many web pages for a yellow pagesstyle directory to scale to the web, even in a local market, and this is why search engines are so important these days.

Simply slapping a few web pages together in Microsoft Word and exporting them to a website will not guarantee visitors. Your site may get listed in Google but without good copy and links to your sites from others, your website will be relegated to dark corners of the Google search index where nobody goes.

Like a car, a website needs to be finetuned in order to rank well in a search engine. A whole industry has grown around pimping websites, or as it is more technically called, 'Search Engine Optimisation'.

Richard Hearne from Red Cardinal specialises in making websites perform optimally for searchers. He explains the importance of key words and of links.

"The first step to ranking well is to figure out what key words people type in to Google to find those goods, services or information. Key word research is therefore central to search engine optimisation. The second factor, which is especially important to Google, is the back link profile of your web site. Links are like votes, and Google uses links as a proxy for the popularity of your site."

The influence of links can be reflected by new dictionary terms such as 'Google bombing' and 'link bombing'. A famous case for this was when thousands of websites linked to the official White House profile of George W Bush with the linking text 'Miserable Failure'. Despite the fact the White House web page did not have that phrase, the page was the number one result on Google, Yahoo! and MSN, because the phrase was in the text of the links pointing to the profile.

Getting links for your site can be easy to do. You can get yourself listed in various niche web directories out there and you can ask your customers and business partners for links to you from their websites. Another surefire way for businesses to get more links is to start a company blog that discusses the industry you work in. Once you write insightful and interesting blog posts, other bloggers will link to your website as recognition for your writing.

Of course, there's nothing like a controversy to get links. In May 2006, Tom Raftery and the IT@Cork organisation were faxed a cease and desist letter from O'Reilly publications because IT@Cork was having a half-day conference with the phrase 'Web 2.0' in the title, something which O'Reilly said it had the rights to.

Raftery wrote about this in a blog post on his website and included a copy of the cease and desist letter. The reaction from web users was phenomenal with Raftery's site becoming the talking point of the very large IT community online for the next week and Raftery riding an avalanche of traffic and inbound links.

"About 17,000 people visited the post in the first 24 hours with another 17,000 visiting it in the next two-three days, " recalled Raftery. No less than 141 different websites linked to the post on Raftery's website in total and Raftery says he was contacted for numerous consulting and talking gigs as a result.

Too many links can also be bad for a site if you do not have the best infrastructure in place. Another survey from Hitwise shows that online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is the third-most popular destination that Google sends its users to. Wikipedia does not contain any form of advertising and so far has been helped along with funding drives and rich benefactors but with Google sending more and more traffic to it every month due to more and more people linking to Wikipedia, the site is finding it are forever buying more servers and upgrading its bandwidth to cope with the traffic.

Many industry types believe it is only a matter of time before Wikipedia will take ads, or else it will have to turn away web surfers.

Most website packages on offer from hosting companies these days are not designed to cater for the 17,000 visitors Tom Raftery got in one day. Should you find your site on the front of social linking sites like Slashdot. org or Digg. com then you could expect 15,000 or even 50,000 visitors in one day. This is when an avalanche of links, positive or not, can take your site completely offline and damage your business.

Ed Byrne, sales manager for website hosting company Host365, has advice for those expecting a lot of links and the traffic that comes with them.

"If your site gets a spike in traffic, the server may become overloaded, or in order to protect the other customers on that server, the hosting company may shut your site down altogether.

The simple way of ensuring your site stays up then is getting your own dedicated server.

This means leasing a box, with web server components, dedicated bandwidth and technical support in a proper data centre. The typical cost for a good server, with decent support and bandwidth/power SLAs is around Euro200 to Euro250 a month."

Like all performance enhancements, there are hidden costs, from more fuel consumption in your car to more traffic consumption on well-linked websites.

Links are free and easy enough to get, but remember the costs that come with traffic avalanches.