Ebooks

Services

Inbound Links aka Backlinks

Having links from other websites to your website is a critical part of the search engine optimization process. As well as the obvious of having traffic follow these links to your site, inbound links provide the following:

* Search engine spiders follow links between sites. The more quality inbound links you have, the more often spiders will visit your site.
* Many search engines count the links to your website as "votes" for your site. They assume that if alot of websites link to your site it must be of high quality. Page Rank is Google's way of counting links.

The general rule is that the more inbound links you can get, the better. Getting more links should almost certainly be near the top of your priority list when optimizing your site.

Important: Before you start trying to use inbound links, read this page and pay attention to the warnings!

Check for Inbound Links

You can use search engines to find out how many inbound links you have. For example, with any search engine such as Google or Yahoo, enter the word link: followed by the URL you are checking to see a list of all websites which have a link to that site.
 

Natural Links

The best way to get inbound links is to create web pages which other webmasters will link to also known as natural links. Natural links are the type of links which are created to increase the usefulness of the internet  Natural links have many advantages:

* You don't have to work to acquire them (except creating the content in the first place).
* They are free and you don't have to reciprocate the link.
* The links will be diverse, with different anchor text.
* The referring pages tend to be similarly themed (this is likely to become more important in the future).

When enough natural links are pointed to a site it can give your site a boost. However most websites need to make work hard to obtain inbound links. You must be very careful with  inbound links! There is many ways you can create links to your website - some of them are acceptable by search engines and some aren't. Using the wrong methods may penalize your website severely.

Acceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links

These methods are all great ways to obtain inbound links to your website:

* List your website in good quality directories.
* Contact other websites /webmasters with sites relevant to yours and ask for a reciprocal link between sites.
* Use your URL as part of your signature in blogs, forums and newsgroups. Don't overdo it though - keep your signature short and to the point and never spam forums, this can cause you to be banned from certain forums or blogs. Make sure you are genuinely contributing to any discussions and not just posting for the inbound link.

Unacceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links

There are no official laws or rules about what is unacceptable linking, but the following methods are widely accepted as being a very bad idea and likely to damage your rankings:

* Free-for-all link pages or link farms. These are websites which allow anyone to post their URL without being part of any structured directory. Link farms exist to benefit the linked websites rather than any person trying to use the links. Search engines hate link far and linking with them may cause your site to be banned from certain search engines.

* Buying links. Some webmasters sell links from pages with high Page Rank value. These can be very effective however search engines such as Google frowned upon this method and  have been known to identify and blacklist the websites involved.