Not too long ago it was the dream of every company to one day have its own website. Today, if you are going to be successful, it is no longer a dream, but a mandatory reality. We all should agree on that fact.

Where does a business or organization begin? By planning their web presence very thoroughly, but this time the dream is to be autonomous, self-governing and without reliance on outside influences, or industry competitors.

Nice dream!

The reality is that it simply cannot be so in order to be successful.

I was watching one of my favorite TV shows and an example was given to show how a single house in a neighborhood cannot be autonomous when it comes to its asking or even its selling price. And as a former Realtor(r) I can vouch for that.

The example shown was that of a line of floats in a swimming pool that go from one side to the other to separate on portion from the other. Here the focus is on any of the floats. When one has weight added to it, pulling it under water, it does not go under without having an effect on the floats on either side of it and they having effect on the floats outside of them and so on.

The price of a house's asking or selling price directly affects the asking and selling price of all adjacent houses. In real estate when obtaining a property to sell, in order to accurately price the listing you do a comparative analysis, among other things, valuing like houses or neighboring houses and adjusting your value accordingly.

OK! How does this apply to websites?

It's not a stretch at all. When you are building a website you not only create attributes, qualities for your own site, you are going to affect potentially hundreds or thousands of other sites.

"How is this possible?" say you.

The page flow, internal links, content, external links, social networking, and everything else in an search engine optimization effort and ultimately the SERP's where results from other sites are displayed around yours and ultimately you displace the rankings of other sites - the sphere of influence your website has on other domains is pretty important.

When you choose a "partner" that you would like to have a link on their site to yours, depending upon your popularity (now and in the future) you will have an effect on their popularity, relativity and validity. Of course these metrics are subject to change without notice.

As a side note, that should be the disclaimer on all SEO RFP, RFQ and contracts - "Applied metrics used to hypothetically enhance your search engine page results are believed to be valid at the time of this writing, and are subject to change by each search engine, without notice, reason or explanation." Or the condensed version - "If it don't work, it ain't my fault."

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen, fellow SEO enthusiasts and professionals, autonomy in websites does not exist. Individual websites are really a cog on a gear turning the big wheel of web space we call the Internet. Design with care.