What can inbound links do for your search engine optimization?

Inbound links are reciprocal links from other websites that point to your web site.

The number and quality of inbound links has become one of the most important factors in ranking algorithms of Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and other major search engines.

It’s simple, if page a) links to page b)…it counts as a vote or recommendation from page a to page b.

You want a higher quality exchange link that’s relevant to your keywords, these links that point to your web site give you better website traffic.

In the past the number of links could be manipulated by webmasters who submitted their web sites to FFA (free-for-all) links pages and similar sites, search engines improved the way they evaluated links.

Nowadays, it’s not enough to have many incoming links.

The quality of the links is also important.

A link that contains the keyword for which you want to have high rankings in the link text is better than five links with the text Click here.

A link from a web site that has a related topic is much better than
links from unrelated sites or link lists.

You’ll benefit in many ways from good inbound links:

1. Other web sites send you new visitors through the links.

If you have 500 links pointing to your site and each site sends you average of 3 visitors per day, you’ll get 1,500 targeted visitors per day.

Later, we’ll show you how to get many more link partners so that you’ll get
even more targeted traffic to your site.

2. All major search engines use link popularity to rank web sites.

If your site has a high link popularity, you’ll have high rankings on the search engines.

To improve your link popularity (and improve your search engine ranking), you must have good inbound links.

3. Exchanging reciprocal links with other sites will build a great link directory.

Your visitors bookmark your site and visit your site again and again because you can offer them a valuable resource: your link directory.

Later on, we’ll show you how to build such a link directory automatically in the design of your Web site.

Inbound links:

• Should be from related web pages
• Should include keywords you want to have high search engine rankings
• Should not include exactly the same link text over and over because that looks unnatural to search engines
• Should contain different related link texts to show search engines that your site has valuable information about a specific topic…

When you get links to your website, go for quality not quantity.

Do not participate in linking schemes that promise hundreds of links within days.

Search engines don’t like these systems and the quality of these links is generally very low.

Better focus on fewer links with higher quality.

While automated linking schemes and link farms can get you banned from search engines, high quality links lead to lasting results.

It takes longer to get high quality links but results will pay for your efforts.

What are the different types of inbound links?

A website can have different types of inbound links. The most common types are:

• Inbound links from Internet directories such as DMOZ.org
• Reciprocal links (a web site links to you and you link to them)
• Inbound links from people who find your web site interesting
• Inbound links from press releases, articles, etc…

Every link type can help your web site and no link type is better or worse than the other.

If a link works for you depends on what you want to achieve with the link.

In the next issue, we’ll explain how you can make links work for you.