Although search engine algorithms are top-secret, pretty much everyone knows that having links (both inbound and to some extent outbound) improves your ranking. To some extent, this is covered in the Search Engine Optimization articles, but it's very important.
The first thing to know is to steer clear of bad sources of links. Avoid them like the plague. Seriously, links from low quality sites not only don't help your ranking, but may actually hurt it. By low-quality sites, I don't just mean boring / useless / unpopular websites, these just don't do much good. I mean link farms (these are sites that have very little content and just a collection of links). If you've been lucky enough not to run into one of these sites yet, you're definitely not missing much. Don't bother linking to these sites, their links pages are buried, have no Page Rank (the Google measure of how effective a link is) and are crammed with dozens of equally bad pages. Don't go there. This also goes for both the free and paid submission services that make offers like get listed on a million sites in 15 minutes. If you want to try this strategy, well, knock yourself out, but don't say I didn't warn you.
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Link Assistant is an SEO tool that will help you cut your link building time. They also build a rank checker and SEO SpyGlass, a tool for analyzing your competitors. |
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We're looking for websites that have a good reputation. Links from good websites carry far more weight than links from bad ones. Google Page Rank (almost always abbreviated to PR by webmasters in the know) is a very good measure of this (although Page Rank is not very directly related to your ranking in the search results). You can check Google PR with tools like this one or most link management software does it for you.
Much more important than a site's PR is it's overall quality. Good websites to link with are, well, just plain good websites period. Websites that have plenty of content are good. A visitor friendly layout (not too much flash, no confusing javascript or frames or any of that rubbish) is good for visitors and search engine robots. Basically, you want to link with the kind of place that you would be happy visiting getting visitors from and sending visitors to. Links pages should be easy to find from the site's front page, well organized, and relevant (without being a massive directory).
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Link Building Direct provides linking services. They will help you with creating backlinks and do link exchanging for your website. |
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A good place to find link exchanges are webmaster forums. Some link management software will also help you find webmasters who are interested in exchanging links. There are also well-organized link exchange sites on the Internet designed to bring a lot of webmasters together.
So, is getting lots of good links for your site worthwhile? YES - it does nothing but good for your business. However, like the shampoo adverts say "it won't happen overnight, but it will happen." As you slowly climb the search engine rankings, you'll find yourself getting more and more free, and still good quality, visitors, and that is perhaps the holy grail of traffic.
One last powerful trick - get people to link to you by a phrase that you want to rank well for in searches rather than by your site name. For example, it's much better to be linked to using the phrase "Casino Reviews" rather than "Casino Hall" because this tells search engines that your site is about casino reviews, not about casino hall.
