Inbound Links SEO is more of an art than a science. Inbound links are necessary in order to achieve a high position in the search results because search engines see links to your site as a recommendation that your website is worth looking at (especially if they are what are called one-way links, i.e. there is no link back from your website to the site that is linking to you). Since links are seen by search engines as a measure of popularity, they award sites with lots of inbound links a higher place in the search results in an effort to present the very best results first.
Linking must have been fairly straightforward before Google went and complicated the issue of getting links by introducing a Page Rank rating system (or PR rating) for each web page it encounters. The higher the PR (the highest is 10), the more importance Google assigns to any web page (or at least you would expect that to be the case). Whether or not that is the case, it seems that most webmasters believe it to be so, and that's what matters.
You can see any web page's Page Rank value, also called it's Google PR by downloading the Google toolbar - from Google of course.
A neat idea you might think, but imagine trying to persuade another webmaster that there's some value in him or her exchanging links with your site when your PR = 0, nothing, nada, zilch!
To make matters worse, even when you've begged, borrowed or bribed your way to get your first 100 links, an arduous task not unlike astronaut training or achieving the almost impossible, your PR might still be zero because Google only revise PR a few times a year, so you're stuck there as I was for several months with fingers crossed that something will appear in the Google bar when you next visit your own website, making life a little easier, and so on and so on until you reach a point where you have a PR of 3 or 4 (if you're still alive by then) and people start asking you to exchange links with them.
 |
DON'T even start the exercise of getting links to your site unless you have plenty of time on your hands. It will take you a long time to achieve any significant results, and even though I'm against paying for something you can do yourself, this is a heartbreaking task with an uncertain payoff in an equally uncertain and distant future, so my advice is to eave it to the experts if you can afford it. |
INBOUND LINK FARMING
Inbound Link Farming is the term used for the process of getting inbound links. Don't confuse this with Link Farms a lot of which charge a fee for allowing you access to their other members who are willing to exchange links. Remember that an exchange link is valued a lot less than a one way inbound link to your site.
I've seen websites with a links directory almost as big as the yellow pages and yet the website doesn't figure anywhere significantly in the search results.
|
DON'T use Link Farms, search engines have long known about them, and you will not achieve any significant results or worse still, may find your site black listed (or "sand boxed" to use the jargon). |
 |
DO get an expert expert seo service to get you the links for you as they often have contact with a lot of website owners who are willing to put a link on their website pointing to yours. But BEWARE, there are plenty of predators out there looking for easy prey who they can fleece with their myths. |
INBOUND LINKS
