Inbound links tips for traffic and search

Get more inbound links!
You need to improve your rank in the search engines if you want to increase your natural traffic and your rank is greatly influenced by the number and type of inbound links to your site. The higher you rank in the search results the higher your traffic will be. So inbound links are critical to the success of your website or blog - whether you just want more visitors or you are looking to generate income from your site.

Inbound links are simply the hyperlinks that come from another site to your site.

Getting good quality inbound links takes time and hard work. There are companies that can generate inbound links for you - if you are prepared to pay.

You can run into problems with the search engines though if a lot of links are generated unnaturally from unrelated sites over a short time.

There are things that you can do though to increase your natural inbound links and this will also help to ensure that your site gets well indexed by the search engines.

Natural links develop when other people judge that your site is valuable to them and decide that linking from their site to yours would be valuable to them or their visitors.

1. You will hear the phrase "Content is King" and this is undoubtedly true when it comes to getting natural inbound links. If your web content is good and informative on whatever subject your are covering then over time people will link to your site.

2. Be unique. When you post on a Blog for example don't just repeat a post from another blog ( that's copyright theft anyway). Try to say something unique and with a unique slant. make sure your post has a unique title if possible but try to include relevant keywords in your post title.

3. Avoid irrelevant subjects if your blog is supposed to be a niche subject blog. If your blog is about dogs then a post on the presidential election isn't going to help. Unless one of the candidates has a dog perhaps and you comment on this!

4. Make sure that you can write! It's amazing how often I come across blogs that are written in English by people who seem unable to write clear understandable English. That must be your first priority. Once you are able to write in a clear understandable way then you can give it a bit of personality!

5. Think like a visitor. Why do people come to your site? What are they looking for? Identify this and then make sure you give it to them. If you do this consistently then people will keep coming back and to make this easier they will probably put a link to your site on their site. Hey presto - inbound links!

6. Article writing is another way of getting inbound links. You write articles and submit them to article directories where people looking for content for their site pick them up. When they post the article on their site your link is included.

7. Join forums with subjects relevant to your site. Often you will be able to include your website link in your forum signature. This gives an inbound link and forum users may also follow it to your site. Beware though - on such forums it is often frowned on if you start directly promoting your site. Be a good forum member - stick to the topics and let your web link do its own work.

8. Start your own Forum. A note of caution though - you will need to spend a lot of time moderating a forum ( until you have some regulars who may help with moderation). You could ask forum members to link back to your site from theirs.

9. Review products or sites. Sometimes if you do an interesting review of a product or site the owners may be pleased with it and decide to link back to it from their site. This can be a very powerful inbound link.

10. Commenting on other Blogs. First of all - don't be a plonker and just do "drive by" comments. They are a pain in the ass. No one likes them and you will just put people of your site. Leave useful and interesting comments. Be provocative if you want. Just don't leave one line "Nice post" comments.

12. Direct link exchange requests. Long long ago in the mists of time when the Internet was still an infant everyone did this. You just asked someone to link too you and you linked to them. Easy.

This still works sometimes but don't think that some big corporate website is going to agree to exchange links with you if you are a newbie blogger. Check out the sites you are going to ask for a link exchange. If they are similar to yours in the size then the chances of them agreeing are much greater. There are link exchange schemes out there. Some good. Some bad.

You will need to do lot of asking to get this kind of link exchange. Don't be disappointed if lots of people refuse or don't even reply. Its the way of the Internet world. Keep trying and you will find someone who wants an exchange.

There are other methods of getting inbound links and I will cover these in another post.