Inbound links are links that are published on other websites that point back to your website. For example, if you posted a guest blog article on someone else’s website and in the article body or author’s biography a link to your website is published along with the article. Inbound links are a crucial part of search engine optimization practices. They work to deliver more traffic to your site, and they also notify the search engines that your site is an important enough resource to rank higher in their search engine listing.
The important part of creating inbound links is to have them placed on high quality websites. A million inbound links on websites that do not rank in the search engines are not going to help. In contrast, a few inbound links on highly ranked, high traffic websites could increase traffic and search engine optimization results exponentially. There are a variety of ways to get inbound links for your website. Guest blogging was one idea that was already mentioned. Writing compelling blog posts for relevant, high quality websites is a viable and successful practice to increasing the amount of inbound links to your website.
Along with guest blogging, submitting articles to article submission sites can rank higher in the search engines much quicker than if you published them on your own website. Make sure it is a high level article directory such as Ezine Articles. It is beneficial to choose directories that include “follow” links. Otherwise the link will not count in the search engines, although it may help you gain traffic from visitors clicking on the link to go to your site.
One way to get inbound links is to create articles on your own website. You can post them to bookmarking sites such as Delicious or Digg. If you write articles about other companies, that company may want to post the link to their social networking and bookmarking sites as well. On the topic of other websites, creating reviews for relevant products or services to post on Amazon, Alexa or Epinions can create some great inbound link opportunities.
Whichever inbound link efforts you decide to take, make sure you are linking with high quality sites, with compelling information that will complement the image your business wants to create. Steer away from link building sites, linking directories or other mass linking practices. Those are frowned upon in search engines and they may even blacklist your site.
