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Are Your Inbound Links Up To Snuff?

Inbound Linking is critical to securing a top or at least a viewable ranking on the major search engines. You are looking to maximize the exposure of your web site to a targeted customer base. A proper approach to your linking strategy will ultimately expand your web site's traffic and your online business.

Getting incoming inbound links used to be simple. Just troll the Internet for willing webmasters and ask for a link, in exchange for you linking back to them. Easy. Right? Not so fast. This is what is known as a reciprocal link. There are several types of links you need to be aware of, but the two most important are "reciprocal" where they link to you and you to them and "one-way" links, where they are only linking to you. Both types of links can benefit your site. Search engines look at your site from the standpoint of how many incoming links it has. The more links, the greater your rank.

But it gets more complicated than that. You do not necessarily want to call up Aunt Gertrude and ask her to for an inbound link from her old-fashioned cooking site she crafted within Geocities to your site about model rocketry. That does not work like it might have in the old days. Why? Because search engines are smarter these days. They have morphed. Now they want the link to be RELEVANT. If your site is about model rocketry, you need links from other rocketry sites or sites RELATED to model rocketry.

A related topic to link relevancy is the discussion of where the link points to on your site. The more relevant the link is, the better the search engines like it. This is commonly referred to as "deep linking" because the site linking to yours is not just pointed at your top page, but is linked deep within your site's structure. This increases the links relevancy. It's also known as "context-relative" linking.

A linking strategy often overlooked by novice webmasters is the tactic of creating the appearance of an inbound link within the content of a relevant article on the site. As long as it does not appear out of place, and particularly if it is serving a useful purpose to the reader of the article, it helps the site's linking strategy, and therefore it's link popularity.

At the end of the day, when implementing a good linking strategy, think with your WHITE HAT on, not your black hat. This is a simple set of phrases that denote whether a webmaster is trying to trick the search engines, or staying with the practice of being a good Internet citizen and providing valuable content to the world at large. Think quality. Think relevance. And the traffic will beat a path to your door.

Steve is a CPA, real estate developer and author who has been an online entrepreneur since long before the web arrived. To learn more about web traffic tactics and strategies, check out his http://trafficmentor.net community.

posted by fdwvsmr92018 @ 10:58 AM