Links | Backlinks

Ahhh, those precious links. If you are familiar with the way they work you should still read this article. Links, especially back-links are the most important part of Search Engine Optimization. Knowing and pursuing are critical to your website. The most important 2 that I will discuss below are outbound (links) and inbound (backlinks).

You need to make sure every page in your website link to one another, this is critcal to search engines when you submit your website to their index. Search engines work similar to a spider crawling up a web, they start with your home page and scan every bit of content, to store in their index, if they hit a page that has no internal links (link to another page) it stops, it will not index any page after that. Your web pages that do not get indexed will still show up in search results, however they will lose significant rank status. Submitting a sitemap and reviewing its analytics will help you fix any crawl issues. I will discuss building and submitting a sitemap and using analytics to monitor your status in another article that will be on the right sidebar titled sitemaps/analytics.

Outbound Text Links

Search engines rest heavily on what is called trust rank, remember there job as a search engine is to bring the most relevant content to users. Trust rank is based on how friendly you are in the community, just like when your looking for a doctor and you find one threw a friend or family member, you give that doctor a certain level of respect based on what your friend said. Well the same goes for search engines, they first want to see outbound links, links to other websites, these need to be relevant to your content, like referencing something on the page to backup what you are saying is true. An example of this are the pages throughout this blog, the words that are blue are outbound links.

Inbound (Backlinks)

Backlinks on the other hand are a bit more difficult to acquire. They are links coming from another website to your website. This tells Google that your Website, is trusted by X website. There are many companies that offer purchasing of links, this is a scam and Do Not attempt it, Google and others are aware of most sites that offer this service and eventually ban them, you do not want Google to find your site associated with these services because you will be dropped in trust rank.

Back links are not as easy as they may sound, search engines base off trust rank. These links are so important based on what website(s) they are coming from. Search engines give you a higher level of trust based on the friends website linking to you, basically the better friends you have the more trust rank you will get. If you were able to get an inbound link from a website like Facebook, that would mean more to Google than being friends with 20 other regular sites.

How to Acquire Inbound Links 

If you have a friend that owns a company/business and there on the web that would be the easiest place to start. This however is not available to most.

Ask your competitors! As funny as that may sound, it works. Keep in mind your competitors are looking for the same thing you are, Trust Rank. Google thrives on the sites that are friendly and willing to help others, so let's say you have 20 other sites in your category, you swap links with one of those sites, well now according to Google you and the other site mean more to Google than the other 18 websites resulting in the number 1 and 2 spot. This is just an example to point out what trust rank means and how it works with search engines. It will be far more to your advantage to share the competition with another site.

Do your research and create a personalized email to your competitors management team or webmaster. Make sure your website is content rich and professional looking, remember your competitor is making a decision to put there name on the line, in telling Google they trust you. Your competitors are looking for the same trust building with Google, it would be a benefit to them if your site is trust worthy to Goolge. 

Be sure to explain in the email the benefit it would be for them, how extravagant your website is going to be, include you websites address so they can easily view it. 

Do this for all your competitors and I guarantee you will get at least one if not more to agree and exchange links. Try to get them to place it on there home page.