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How to Get In-Bound Links to Your Website
Getting in-bound links to your site
is one of the most important things you can do for generating
traffic to your site.
Because:
* It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.
* It helps to boost your position
in the search engine.
* It helps to build small streams
of traffic to your site.
Links to your site are normally given
by also giving a link from your site to the other one.
These are called reciprocal links or link swaps. And
naturally there are a few services available to automate
the link somehow.
Some of these services will automatically
add the link to your site and the other site once your
link request is approved (through some software to be
installed on your site).
Some will simply point you to sites
which do use link swaps and who are interested in hearing
from you.
Some will also check that the link to
your site remains in place, and email you if it disappears.
It's then up to you to either contact the owner of that
site to find out why the link has vanished, or to remove
the reciprocal link on your site.
But there is one thing they do not do,
and which you need to watch for:
How would a visitor to the other site
FIND the link back to your site?
Because you can be sure that if a human
visitor cannot find it, then it's unlikely that a search
engine will.
Let me give you an example: Andrew was
using the service at LinkMetro.com to get links to one
of his sites. Someone had a site on a related topic,
and they requested a link back to Andrew's. He checked
the link back to his site, and everything looked OK.
The other site had requested a link back to their homepage
(rather than another specific page), so Andrew checked
out that home page.
What did he find?
* No links to the "link directory".
* No link to a "related sites"
page.
* No link to a "resources"
page.
It seemed that the link directory on
that other site was not linked from the home page of
that site.
The other site was requesting inbound
links back to its home page, but effectively hiding
the return link from the search engines and from website
visitors. And that makes the link back to Andrew's site
useless - it's like that link doesn't even exist.
So next time you get asked for a reciprocal
link, check the route that people and search engines
would use to get from that site over to yours. You might
be surprised what you find.
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