Important methods for getting links to your site.

Why are links so important?

As stated in other pages, search engines place a lot of value on inbound links to your site and the text used to label them. As on site SEO becomes more and more standardized, search engines find that links really provide a metric to show how valuable your site may be. Any link to your site is like a vote for your site from another site. If that site is highly ranked in a search engine and is relevant to your site, it helps your site improve in the rankings. Links show evidence of credibility in your site.

The text that is used when linking to your page is also important. If the text contains keywords that are relevant to your site, then it adds even more value. For example, a link to your site that is just a list with your URL is less valuable than a link where the text is some keyword filled description of what you do or the services you provide.

What is relevant?

Any site that your customers are interested in and that you feel is relevant to your business is most likely relevant. The best way to get inbound links is to exchange links with others, so if you feel your customers would want to see a link to a site because it would be helpful to them, then it is probably relevant.

Many believe that links to your site from .gov and .edu sites have more value, as these sites are harder to get and are believed to be more of an authority. This is a highly debated subject, however in many cases, these links have proven to be strong and some in the industry even feel that a non relevant link from a .gov or .edu is more valuable than a relevant link from a .com, .net, etc.

Inbound links are the most valuable links because it shows that another site supports you and is interested in sending its users to you without the benefit of a return link from your site. Of course these are harder to get. The best way to get relevant inbound links is to take advantage of listings as part of national organizations your business may be involved in, or a chamber of commerce you may be involved with. If you don't know if they offer a link to your site from theirs, ask them. Use these resouces as often as possible because they are valuable and free to you.

Dangers

It is extremely important not to link your site to link farms, or sites that are set up for the sole purpose of creating links. As is the case with anything, if something is deemed popular or necessary, sites will pop up that are just trying to make money off of peoples needs. Link farms are sites set up just to have long lists of links without serving any general business need. They will often try to charge you for your link and you can tell from the site that it is not trustworthy. Generally, you can tell by the site when you look at it if it is respectable. It is important to be able to tell a link farm from an actually useful directory, as directories can be helpful for marketing and linking your site.

Link Campaigns

We can offer help in dealing with all the complicated issues of linking campaigns. A link campaign is an organized effort to get relevant and respectable links to your site. Some links such as directories you can get by simply registering to the directory, while highly relevant links to your business often involve finding good sites and contacting their owners to establish reciprocal links between your sites.

We at The SEO Helpdesk have tools to make this much easier and much less time consuming for you. We can either help you find great sites for you to follow up yourselves with email, or we can do it all for you. It's up to you how much you want to get involved. We can do the rest. This can be highly time consuming if researched and done manually. But if you have the time and skill, you can do this yourself from the knowledge we have given you above.

Our tools can find great relevant sites based on keywords you suggest, sites linked to your competitors, or links to directories. We can analyze how these other sites rank, their traffic and other key metrics. Let us help run a link campaign for you.