About Inbound Links

About Link Building (or Off-Site SEO)

Links are an important factor that Search Engines evaluate in determining the popularity and importance of your web page. Because links are important to search engines, it goes without saying that increasing the number of quality links to your website is important in increasing you online visibility and improving your position in search engine rankings.

There are many professional link-building organisations offering a range of services. However, a lot of link building can be generated automatically through you if your website provides informative and useful content that visitors will want to view.

The two main kinds of links are editorial and acquired links.
Editorial links are setup by a website owner or editor, and the context of the link to your site is decided by them. Chances are that they feel a link to your website will be of use to their own web visitors. Usually these links take time to appear, as they are a reward for providing useful and informative content on your site that is freely accessible to the public. These links are generally given more importance by search engines than acquired links.
Acquired links can be free or purchased. These are generally obtained by the site owner by:
 - contacting another organisation and persuading them to provide a link.
 - self creation, i.e. entering links to your own site in someone else's blog or online discussion forum
 - reciprocal links – generally frowned upon by search engines if both sites have nothing in common, but can be valuable if both sites have similar and relevant content.

Beware of certain online directories.
Many online directories can provide links to your website, and will positively effect your placement in search engine rankings. However, there are also many malicious online directories on the web who aim to just make money from providing links but do not categorise links in any structured manner, and are of no real use to web browsers looking for specific information. These directories are generally provide broad, generic lists. To check if a directory is dubious – search for it in the major search engines – if it does not appear – it has likely been banned.
The main search engines are aware of many of these practices and have removed many dubious directories from their searches. Beware of emails asking you to purchase links, with statements suggesting they will improve your ranking in search engines.
Do not however discount all online directories, they can be a very useful source of web traffic. Some of the major directories are:
Open Directory Project 
About.com
Yahoo Directory 
Librarians Internet Index

How search engines value links

Although search engines give more value to editorial links as mentioned above, there are other influences that effect link value. Search engines keep much of this information to themselves, but the following characteristics of the site linking to you may be taken into consideration:

Value:
A website already popular in search engines likely already has relevant quality links pointing to it. A link from such a site will therefore likely be of more value than one from a less popular site. You can get an idea of a web page's popularity through it's Google Page Rank. Google's Page Rank is on a scale from 0 to 10, the higher the number, the more value given to it by Google.

Related Content:
A website that contains relevant content to your site will provide a more valuable link than a site that has no relevancy or related content to yours.

Trust:
A link from a trusted site, such as .gov,.edu, .com.au (a site whose domain can only be registered once certain criteria have been met) will generally be of higher value than a standard equivalent  .com site.

Amount of links:
If a page linking to your website also links to numerous other websites, the value of the link decreases.

Hyperlink text:
A hyperlink including text containing keywords that are relevant to the page it is linking will be valued higher than a link with no relevant text in the hyperlink (such as 'click here').

All of the above factors should also be considered when you are providing links from your site to another.
It is better to have a few high quality, valuable and relevant links than thousands of low quality, invaluable, irrelevant links.