The importance of incoming links to increase your search engine rankings.

Building your website is only the first step in developing a successful online business or community.

When you launch you will probably have very little or no traffic (visitors) to website because they won’t know you exist.

Your next job is to let people know about your website and the services or products that you offer. The best way of doing this is through increasing the number of incoming links to your website from other websites.

Incoming links

An incoming link is a link to your website from another website. Not only does it generate traffic to your website because people tend to follow links from site to site, but it also means that the more incoming links you have to your website the higher you will rank in the search engine listings.

The largest of the search engines – Google - not only looks at the amount and quality of text on each page on your website to decide where you will rank in its search engine results, but it also looks at how many incoming links to your website there are. In short, Google thinks that the more incoming links there are to a website, then the more important that website must be.

On topic links

You may be thinking that you can ask every man and his dog to link to your website and it will increase the traffic to your website and therefore your search engine rank. Unfortunately Google knows about this tactic and it is why an ‘on-theme’ or ‘on-topic’ link is valued a lot more than a link from a completely unrelated website.

For example if you are a cake retailer selling cakes online, a link from a food website is an on-topic link, whereas a link from a mobile phone manufacturer is completely off-topic and is unrelated. Google can compare and on-topic link against an off-topic link and this will be reflected in your ranking in its results listing.

Non-reciprocal incoming links

A website linking to you without you linking back to them is a non-reciprocal link, and is valued more than a reciprocated links (i.e. a link exchange). Again, Google will see this as evidence of the importance of your website if people want to link to you without reciprocating the favour.

The best and most prevalent source of non-reciprocal links are from directories. Popular directories include Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project. However there are hundreds of general and industry-specific directories on the web.

Other sources of non-reciprocal links

Short of emailing other websites to request a one-way link to your site (which most webmasters will not provide) another good method of increasing the number of high-quality incoming links is to include the URL to your site whenever posting on a forum or blog. If you don’t post regularly to a forum or blog, then try and find one within your industry or community and contribute as often as you can. Not only will you be seen as an expert, but each time you post and leave your URL to your website, you are creating a one-way link to your website.

Reciprocal linking

Finally there is reciprocal links which are usually the result of a link exchange. You link to a website in return for a link back. These links do not carry as much weight as far as major search engines like Google are concerned. However ,as the main objective is to increase traffic to your website, reciprocal links are great because very often users will browse though the web by following links from website-to-website and these links are a good method of increasing your exposure and traffic.

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