The Necessity of In-bound Links

In parts one through three of this tutorial, I discussed selecting the best keywords for the page you want to rank, analyzing the competition for those keywords, and optimizing the web page format so that the search engines know it is relevant to your chosen keywords. In this article I will discuss why you need to get other webmasters to link to your site, and how you go about doing so.

Step 4 : Getting Links

Now I’m ready to start getting in-bound links. In-bound links serve two purposes:

If it’s a new site, they will get your site crawled by the search engines and put into the index.

They will help a site rank well if the link text contains the keywords you’re targeting.

There’s a couple of methods you can use to get in-bound links, but I only use one of them.

You can pay other sites to link to you.

You can swap links (called reciprocal linking) with other sites.

When I’m actively trying to get links, I only do number two. I’m told that number one works better than number two because one-way links are more highly valued by the search engines than reciprocal links, but I’ll tell you why I don’t care.

First, though, a little explanation of one way links. A one way link is a link that points from some other site to your site, but your site does not link back to the other site.

The search engines value one-way links more highly because they figure it’s not just “artificial” link trading going on, but that somebody has given you a real live “vote” for your site without you asking for it–the greatest compliment.

Yes, one way links are more valuable. But I don’t care.

Why not? First of all, as I said before, I don’t go after fiercely competitive keywords, so usually reciprocal links work just fine. Secondly, if you have a quality site with quality content, after getting some reciprocal links into your site and getting some visitors, people will start to link to your site with one way links, and you won’t have to pay for those!

If you decide to go my route and do reciprocal linking, here are the steps you need to take to do it right:

1. Do a search at the engine you want to rank for using the keywords you want to rank for.

2. Go to each page that ranks well and email the webmaster offering to trade links.

3. Once you’ve emailed all of them, do the link: command on each of those ranking pages and email all of the webmasters who link to those pages to see if they will link to you, too.

If it sounds like an enormous amount of work, that’s because it is.

Well, it is if you do it all manually, and I hate to do things manually. I guess that’s the programmer in me coming out–I want to automate everything.

So how do I automate the process? How do I drive dozens or hundreds of in-bound links into my site without writing a manual email to thousands of webmasters? The tool I use that makes the whole process a breeze will be discussed in the final installment of this five part tutorial.

Jonathan Leger is the creator of the first commercial AdSense Tracker script packages available, which has grown into the widely-popular product set, AdSenseGold.com

The full 5 part SEO tutorial is also available in an ebook which you can download from: http://AdSenseGold.com/downloads/AdSenseSEO.pdf