Inbound Links Can Help With Website Rankings

If you want to get high search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines, then your website must have a large number of inbound links and a lot of good content.

The link building process comes in three formats: direct links to your website (inbound links), cross linking content on the Internet (reciprocal and 3 way links), and deep linking to specific pages within your website.

The more links you have pointing back to your website the more popular your website is considered to be by all the major search engines, and the higher your search engine ranking will turn out to be.

The idea behind this concept is that search engines think that your website must be important if many other website's provide a link to your site.

Unfortunately the number of inbound links alone is not enough to improve your search engine rankings. It's also important that the other website's are related to your website in some clearly defined way. If the links to your site include your important keywords in the link text, then it's easier to get high rankings for these keywords.

It's not necessary that the other website is all about your particular topic. As long as the other website has a single category page (or pages) that deals with the topic of your website then the link to your site should be listed on that page.

The more pages of the other site that are about your topic, the better. Make sure that the link to your site is in a 'good neighbourhood' and that the other links are related to yours as closely as possible. Do not end up in a list that includes shoe repairs, pc repairs etc if your site is all about a beauty product! It's important that you don't end up in a list of totally unrelated links.

As you search the Internet to find suitable inbound links the Page Rank of a particular website should not influence your linking decision. If you see a good website with good relevant content that has a low Page Rank, you should still try to get a link from that website.

If you want to find out which website's Google considers related to your website, go to Google and enter related:www.your-domain.com in the search box. Replace your-domain.com with your own domain name and make sure that there is no space after the colon.

The process of getting inbound links will not only generate traffic from the search engines, but also generate traffic from website's where your link is posted. Oddly enough you will often get traffic from these website's before receiving traffic from the search engines themselves.

You should consider link building as a long term process that will increase the mass of information about your website that's available online. The links to your website will accumulate over time and will have a shelf life of many years.

Setting up a Links Page

Setting up a page of links on your own website can encourage other website's to seek cross linking opportunities with you and therefore also increase the number of inbound links pointing to your site.

A well styled links page shows that you have high regard for the advantages of cross linking and can spell out what links you are prepared to accept. Just as with inbound links, it is important that the website's on your links page are related to your website in some clearly defined way.

Take a look at the QBS PC Help links page. You will see that we state clearly what type of sites we accept links from: -

Sticking to your core theme is important as the major search engines like to see relevant content on your website and will therefore give your site more credibility. This in turn will push your site up the search engine rankings and attract more visitors to your online business.

So good quality inbound links that are from related sites and are on-topic can vastly improve the number of people accessing your site.

Checking your Link Popularity

To find out how well your website is doing in terms of inbound links its a good idea to frequently test your link popularity. Doing this on a regular basis will help you to detect trends.