Inbound Links
Inbound Links / Backlinks
Having links from other websites to yours is a critical part of search engine optimisation. As well as the obvious bonus of having people follow these links to your site, inbound links provide the following benefits:
- Search engine robots follow links between websites. The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit your site.
- Many search engines count links to your site as “votes” for you. They assume that if lots of websites link to your site it must be high quality. Page Rank is Google’s system of counting links.
- 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).
- List your website in directories.
- Contact other websites with similar themes to your and ask for a reciprocal link.
- Use your URL as part of your signature in discussion forums and newsgroups.
- Don’t overdo this — keep your signature brief and never spam forums. Make sure you are genuinely contributing to any discussions and not just posting for the sake of displaying your signature.
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 optimising your site.
Natural Links
If you are lucky you will attract enough natural links to give your site a boost. However most websites need to make an effort to acquire inbound links. You must be very careful about this! There are many ways to create links to your website — some of them are acceptable and some aren’t. If you use the wrong methods, search engines may detect this and penalise you severely
