Understanding Website Links

They can also be to your site (incoming/inbound)  or from your site to another site (outgoing/outbound).

Although creating links is relatively straightforward there are some points that you need to be aware of so that you make the best use of your links and so that you don't damage your site by inappropriate linking.

Inbound Links- Importance and Building

Inbound links are a critical part of the search engine algorithm for determining the importance of a page. It is fair to say that without any incoming links your site will not rank at the search engines.

In addition, search engines find your site by following  inbound links to your site from other sites that the search engines already know about. Although there are other ways of adding your site to the search engine index the best way is to get a link from an existing site that is already indexed.

Most people embark on an inbound linking strategy in an effort to improve their ranking at Google and the search engines in general.

As important as this is, it is not the only reason why you should be actively seeking links from other similarly themed sites and directories.

Links can also be  a very important source of traffic.

You may even find that some links bring more traffic than the search engines. In addition, the traffic provided by links is generally consistent and not subject to the vagaries of your search engine ranking.

Links and Google

As part of its ranking algorithm Google placed great emphasis on links and achieving a high ranking in SERPS on Goggle for competitive keywords isn't possible  without incoming links.

One of the most famous illustrations of the importance of links in search engine rankings is the White house biography page of the US president George Bush.

or the Adobe reader

You wont find the words "failure" or "Click here" anywhere on the respective pages but they still are number 1 on Google for those search times and have been for years. Not only that but Yahoo results are almost identical.

The importance of links to Google led to the term and practise of "Google bombing". Defined by Wordspy.com as:

Setting up a large number of web pages with links that point to a specific web site so that the site appears at the top of the Google search results when someone searches for those words.

(see links under resources at bottom of page for more background)

Outbound Links

Outbound links go from your site to an external site and most webmasters try to limit the number of outbound links in an attempt to keep visitors on their site and to avoid loss of page rank in doing so improve the page ranking.

However outbound links can be an important part of improving the ranking of a page when they link to an authority site.

As an example a page on html coding should logically link to html reference pages where the reader can find more information. Good safe sites are Wikipedia and any standard body/government sites.

The only thing to be careful of is that you only link to quality sites. My rough guideline is that if I find that the site contains good information that I think enhances what I have to offer the visitor then I will link to it.

If you look at any technical literature then at the bottom it contains citations detailing where the author sourced some of the ideas/content etc and so a web page that does the same is more valuable to the reader than one that doesn't.

Link Types

Not all links are created equal.

One-Way Inbound Links

The best type of links to get are simple inbound links. These are obtained by other website owners linking to you because you are considered an authority in a particular filed or the article/web page is particularly relevant. These type of links will come if you produce  high quality content web pages, but they come slowly.

The other way of getting simple inbound links is from directories. Most, but not all, directories will list your website without requiring you to link to them.

Reciprocal Links

Link Exchange  was once a  very popular activity but has lost favour over the last few years (since around 2007) due to the way these links are treated by the search engines. I personally no longer actively search for link exchange partners but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't

Exchanging links with other websites is still important especially in the initial stages of site development. However you don't need 100s of links but a few good links.

Examples of Good links are:

• links from relevant authority sites
• links from relevant complementary sites
• links from customer/supplier sites

As an example if you are a window cleaner offering a window cleaning service then a link from one of you suppliers e.g. window cleaning equipment supplier is a relevant site but a link from the local hair dressing site is not so relevant.

However although the hair dressing link may not count very much in the search engines it may bring you lots of good customer traffic.

So in reality all incoming links are good, and some are better than others from a search engine point of view, and some are better than others at bringing traffic.

Finding Websites to Exchange links

There are two ways of doing this the manual method or by using software tools. You can find out how in link exchange .

Related Articles and Resources:

• How to create basic web page/website links-
• History on Google bombing and the Google reaction including how to create your own at Wikipedia.
• Checking for broken links