The Fundamentals of Inbound Links

by Justine Curtis, 9/8/2007

Link development is one of the most overlooked components of a successful search engine optimisation campaign. Web site owners can put all the key phrases they wish on a page, develop killer content and a search-engine friendly navigation scheme, but without a well-planned link-development campaign, crawler based search engine visibility is difficult to achieve and high listings are virtually impossible. This month we will be covering the importance of inbound links, how to get them and what they mean for your web site.

We have all heard that adding quality content to your web site will give the search engines a good idea of how to index your web site, it's a topic we covered in "Content, Content, Content" back in November 2004. But the secret to luring the search engines to your web site, and in part to improving your position within those listings is your inbound links.

So what are inbound links?

Inbound links are simply the links from an external web site to your web site. You will also hear the phrase "link popularity" which is simply a search engines measure of the number and quality of links pointing to a single URL. We will cover "quality" later in this article but a site's home page usually has the highest number of inbound links, or highest link popularity, because site owners tend to link to home pages rather than any other content page.

What makes a quality link?

Achieving good rankings using links used to be simple; today things have become more complex, with search engines using very complicated algorithms to measure the quality of the links that involves: ·Number of links to your site? ·What is written in those links? ·What key phrases are used in those links? ·What is the quality of the site that is linking to yours? ·How many other links does that site have? A link from a web site that the search engine recognises as a leader in your industry carries a lot of clout and means that your web site is important. Two links from industry leaders means your site is even more important. But 100 links from random web sites, from industries you are not even related with, means almost nothing. Thus, getting links is only the start; the important thing is getting good links from quality (high ranking and relevant) web sites.

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