Inbound links?

[DT07]

Hi, web developer said that inward links will help my rankings. Any suggestions as to how this can be done?

Also, need to drastically improve my search rankings as they are pretty poor at the moment - any tips in general?

Thanks

[Pet Nanny]

I heard this also and started to bump up my inward links. I have been informed now however, that you need to be careful about the quality of these links, so I have given up.

I would like to know if you can check how many inward links you have, and if so, how?

Nina
www.ninasnanniesforpets.co.uk (http://www.ninasnanniesforpets.co.uk)

[wood1e2]

Hi,

For value back links, which is what Goolge look for. So links from "link farms" will not be good, links from "trade associations", Travel Agents maybe a member of ABTA, so a link from their site would be good.

Some directories you have to add your URL so far down in their directory search engines will never find you.

http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html

I have found their list pretty helpful over the years.

Also use Goolge, and search "best web Directories" or "best seo directories" you may still not know which is good and which isn't, but if you find a few directories on different websites, then there is some more weight to add your url to them.

One final thing make sure your website has been coded well, using good code practice, has a good title, and is full of revelant content.

[Astaroth]

Links into your site are good.... consider what the anchor text for the link is (ie the words someone clicks on to get to your site) and also consider linking to more than just the landing page as deep links are also another consideration for rankings.

The quality of the page the link is coming from is also taken into consideration. It is worth installing a tool to enable you to easily see the PR of the page your link will be on, whilst PR isnt the be all and end all it is a good enough starter for 10 as to if getting a link from the page is worth while or not.

The offical way of finding back links is to do a search for link:example.com (where example.com is your domain) however a better way is example.com -site:www.example.com (http://www.example.com) -site:example.com

[Reflections]

Nice Info, Keep it.

[Tin]

Hi DT

Sourcing 'on-topic' links are preferable and an easy and quite effective method is to use a Google Operator to filter your search results so that you waste far less time deciding which links to bother with.

Example, let's assume that your website is about model railways. You'd go to Google and in the search box type in... "model railway" (just under a million results) then you'd decide which ones might be suitable then peruse their websites looking for a links page, etc etc. This does take ages to do.

Using a Google operator cuts this time down very considerably. Go to Google and type in the following, (including the speech marks!)

"Add url" +"model railway" the results now shown are just 143. You should see straight away that a number of the pages are right on topic and that they also mention the words "add url" because that formed the first part of your filter. This sort of advanced search simply filters down the earlier 1 mill results to a much more useful number. You're simply telling Google to display "only pages" which contain the 2 words in the first part of your search (add url) but those pages must also contain the other 2 words in your filtered search criteria (model railway). This takes the bulk of boredom out of building inbound links.

The operator can be modified easily to yield more results by changing the filters ie;

"Add link" +"model railway"
"Add link" +"model railways"
"Add a link" +"model railway"
"Add site" +"model trains"
"Add a site" +"hornby trains"
"Add your site" +"hornby train"

It's just one method which you can use to simply source external links that are related in content to your own site. Here's some more ideas on the options for different filters, just up to you to think up the keywords now.

"Add URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add Website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add a website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Add your website" +"your keywords(s)"
"Submit link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit your site" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"your location" +"add url"
"your location" +"suggest a site"
"your location" +"submit site"
"your location" +links
"your location" +"reciprocal links"
"your location" +directory
"Submit Website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit a website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Submit your website" +"your keywords(s)"
"your main keyword phrase" +"submit url"
"your main keyword phrase" + directory
"your main keyword phrase" + resource
"your main keyword phrase" + links
"Suggest link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a link" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a site" + "your keyword(s)"
"Suggest URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest an URL" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest Website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest a website" +"your keyword(s)"
"Suggest your website" +"your keywords(s)"

Doing a backlink check on related sites within pages 1 & 2 can also be very fruitful for sourcing links.

Astaroth mentions anchor text and it's important that you use this in as much of an 'organic way' as possible, don't merely use the same link text over and over, keep things cycling and vary the text used in the links. If you're doing directory submits where guidelines are supplied ensure you follow them to the letter otherwise it's a waste of your time and theirs.

Hope that helps for starters, there's lots of other things to consider like whether the link is 'clean or not' but that's all I've got time for I'm sorry. Maybe someone else will pick that one up and expand a bit.

Good luck

Ray

[sandpetra]

"The offical way of finding back links is to do a search for link:example.com (where example.com is your domain) however a better way is example.com -site:www.example.com (http://www.example.com/) -site:example.com"

Probably best mentioning type these commands in to Yahoo as Google link command is next to useless.

[sandpetra]

Here's a nifty little tool to check your links (http://www.backlinkwatch.com/)

you can check these links above with your competitors too and see who's linking to them. Will they link to you? The above test - it's nice to see high PR pages with a not a lot of outgoing links. The less links the more "link-love you get" as the strength or usefullness of a link degrades by the number of links on a page (PR wise anyway).

But remember it's quality of the link. Go and look at the page you think might be a candidate - if it's in your "neighbourhood" ;) bingo!

Also remember you want your keyword phrase in the link, like my forum signature.

[Astaroth]

"The offical way of finding back links is to do a search for link:example.com (where example.com is your domain) however a better way is example.com -site:www.example.com (http://www.example.com/) -site:example.com"

Probably best mentioning type these commands in to Yahoo as Google link command is next to useless.

Hence mentioning the "better" way of doing it :D

[Astaroth]

There is no software that will directly improve either however there is software that can help you identify ways of doing it such as packages that find suitable sites for links (exchange or one way), send stock emails to the owners, track responses and then ensure those that you do link exchange with maintain the link on their site to you etc

[Reflections]

Manual Submission is helpful for improve your backlinks. Don't think about tools because they can't detect the security codes at the time of submission.

[DarrenC]

For inbound links and one way links think about getting a blog or writing articles and adding them on your site. People will link to the blog or articles and this will improve your rankings.

I have a travel blog with 20,000 links, alot from authority sites, but yet one from ABTA, but I'm working on it ;)

[royaltyfreemusic]

Establishing quality links with high traffic relevent websites is key to good rankings. The more, the better the higher you will rank. Make sure you get links with your chosen keywords.

[Reflections]

Links from PR-3 or more will help you as these links are counted as back links for your site. So getting links form these pages of keep optimising the back links will really helpful.

[sandpetra]

Links from PR-3 or more will help you as these links are counted as back links for your site. So getting links form these pages of keep optimising the back links will really helpful.

Don't just go on PR and say everything under a certain PR is useless. Google Page Rank is calculated every few months, and visible toolbar PR (using the google toolbar) is a few months out of date.

So you don't actually ever know the actual Google Page Rank of a page. Ergo - how do you know the page with a PR of 0 will not be a PR 6 in the next update? ;) - now that would be an excellent link if on topic (or even not for PR juice)

To determine this, have a look at the PR of the domain (ie home page PR) and see how many links it has got going to it (using Yahoo site: command) and while you are at it have a look at the number of links that actually point to the page your getting a link from. :)

Who knows? The page you are looking at links from might have been written yesterday but already generated 50 links. If you can get a link there, that would be good, on citation alone, if relevent, with Google PR juice almost undoubtedly springing from it.

And don't get me wrong I still love the old Google Toolbar PR - as someone mentioned earlier, it's " a good starter" - it's just not the true reflection of a page's worth at any point in time.

And yes I know this is time consuming. That's what you pay for when you outsource this kind of thing.:p

[Reflections]

Go for quality back links and also try social book marking which really help you for inbound links.

[Pet Nanny]

I thought that swapping links is not as beneficial though! In this case, why am I constantly asked to swap links with people?

Nina
Nina's Nannies for Pets

[toystoyou]

Apparently the best back links to have are from Government websites, BBC, ITV huge websites like that that Google ranks v v highly. At least that's what my Ebiz Mentor says.
I had some books featured on an ITV show and ITV gave me a backlink and pretty quickly I started to climb the search engine ranks.
Julie

[Hobbit]

You might consider buying a hard-link from someone like Yahoo directory. SEs love to follow links from the largest sites such as Yahoo, etc. It will help your popularity score. I tried getting one of my site's listed on the Yahoo Directory and paid $300. I got some good traffic back + I got an inbound link from Yahoo.

[sandpetra]

Apparently the best back links to have are from Government websites, BBC, ITV huge websites like that that Google ranks v v highly. At least that's what my Ebiz Mentor says.
I had some books featured on an ITV show and ITV gave me a backlink and pretty quickly I started to climb the search engine ranks.
Julie

What you're describing are "high quality links" or "quality links from authoratitive" domains. As with everything it is contested how valuable these links are but I for one would value them if the link was "relevant".

Getting the BBC to link to you is always a good thing, unless you're on Watchdog I presume! :)

PS - I posted an article recently about link building. Basically I think you need to mix it up (http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/the-perfect-link-strategy-in-seo-mix-it-up/), whatever you do.

[Reflections]

Link form PR-3 or higher pages and relevent counted as high quality links. This is due to the fact that these links are counted as back links for google.

[sabian1982]

Apparently the best back links to have are from Government websites, BBC, ITV huge websites like that that Google ranks v v highly.

Google doesn't give any additional weight to a backlink from a .gov or similar domain name. Whatever your tld the weight of the backlink depends on the quality of content and importance of that incoming link. Of course having a link on the bbc would be highly benefical if the link back page had good content and would likely bring good through traffic!

Build backlinks from sources such as:

http://www.directorycritic.com
http://info.vilesilencer.com
http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

Generating a combination of quality and quantity is the key - this will help your SERPs and your PR.

[boho]

Inbound linking is a link to your site which doesn't have a reciprocal link back from you - i.e an independent vote for your site. However many people myself included get 100's of requests for either three-way or triangular linking as they like to call it, where you give an independent vote (link) to a site that may be of reasonable quality but the requestor is giving you back an inbound link from some rubbish directory or unrelated site in outer mongolia.

I refuse all 3 way linking requests, I've yet to see one that was of any value to either my business or my customers.

Linking to good quality, relevant, good link neighbourhood (i.e those you link to haven't linked to every site known to man relevant or not) reciprocal links do have substance, not least of which is the fact that the customer will quite often look at links and follow them through looking for similar themed good quality to the one they visited (of course if your site is rubbish then they may just hop off too ;) ).

I get 25% of my business through inbound links from articles I have written, press releases, forum posting, social networking etc and from referrals via forums and via links I have swapped with similar themed sites.

Links should be considered from the point of view of whether or not they add value and contribute to the quality of your site - in otherwords viewed from the customers perspective, if you think a site is dire, don't link with it, if you stick to that principle and link to those then the value will be seen.

And ignore Page Rank (PR), it's not relevant, PR fluctuates wildly and bears no reflection on how good, bad or indifferent a site it...it's mostly just an American obsession in the SEO stakes. If it was at all important then the really awful spammy directory sites, littered with links to the vulgar and obscene would have a PR of zero - take it with a very, very, heart attack inducing pinch of salt!

[Learn E-Business]

Hi there

Your web developer is right about in bound links. I wrote this in my ebusiness advice column and thought this would be useful to you:-

"It's great if you can get quality web sites to link to your content, but how about some of your own online PR? As well as online web site directories where you can submit your site, there are also online forums, blogs and social networking communities which allow you to link to your web address.
Online PR is part of any e-marketing strategy! Spreading the word about your web site and business, when chatting in forums, posting articles, blogs and ads is effective. You should leave a coded link to your web site each time. Here are a few tips:

When you leave a forum posting ensure you make a HTML link to your content.

Rather than leave a link which says the name of your web site, make the link something meaningful. This will improve your google ranking. E.g. artisan-decor.co.uk - a decorating company, could use the following example links:


Quality Decorators
Berkshire Decorators
Windsor Decorators
My Decorating Company
Ensure that the forums you subscribe to are meaningful to your web site or business. Nothing worse than being spammed about viagra or motorcycle parts on a music portal.
Write and post quality articles about your site/business/interest in blogs and link back to your site.
Join social and business networking sites such as myspace and ecademy. When you make a posting or comment, ensure you always leave a link to your site. On some sites you can code an attractive graphic into your signature, which advertises and links back to your site".Hope this helps
Kindest Regards
Deborah
Learnbusiness.com

[Reflections]

Hi, all
Nice Tips.
In bound links from indexed pages will make you site crawling regularly and also improve your traffic.