Seach Engine Optimisation
- Inbound Links (Backlinks)
Having links from other websites to yours is a critical
part of search engine optimisation. As well as the obvious bonus of
having people follow these links to your site, inbound links provide
the following benefits:
- Search engine robots follow links between websites.
The more inbound links you have, the more often robots will visit
your site.
- Many search engines count links to your site as "votes" for
you. They assume that if lots of websites link to your site it must
be high quality. Page Rank is Google's system of counting
links.
The general rule is that the more inbound links you
can get, the better. Getting more links should almost certainly be
near the top of your priority list when optimising your site.
Important: Before you start trying
to acquire inbound links, read this page and take heed of the warnings!
Check for Inbound Links
You can use search engines to find out how many inbound
links you have. For example, with Google, enter the word link: followed
by your URL to see a list of all websites which contain a link to your
site. Try it here with www.cnn.com or enter your own URL:
Note: Google only returns pages which have
a PR value of 4 or higher, so it will not show all links to your site.
Other search engines have the same feature and may provide more comprehensive
results. Each one works a bit differently - visit any search engine
and look for "Advanced Search Options" for more information.
Natural Links
The best way to get inbound links is simply to create
web pages which other webmasters will want to link to. These are known
as natural links - the type of link which is created purely
to increase the usefulness of the internet (in an ideal world all links
would be natural). Natural links have many advantages:
- You don't have to work to acquire them (except creating
the content in the first place).
- They are free and you don't have to reciprocate the
link.
- The links will be diverse, with different anchor text.
- The referring pages tend to be similarly themed (this
is likely to become more important in the future).
If you are lucky you will attract enough natural links
to give your site a boost. However most websites need to make an effort
to acquire inbound links. You must be very careful about this! There
are many ways to create links to your website - some of them are acceptable
and some aren't. If you use the wrong methods, search engines may detect
this and penalise you severely.
Acceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links
These methods, used sensibly, are all good ways to acquire
inbound links:
- List your website in directories.
- Contact other websites with similar themes to your
and ask for a reciprocal link.
- Use your URL as part of your signature in discussion
forums and newsgroups. Don't overdo this - keep your signature brief
and never spam forums. Make sure you are genuinely contributing to
any discussions and not just posting for the sake of displaying your
signature.
Unacceptable Methods of Acquiring Inbound Links
There are no official laws or rules about what is unacceptable
linking, but the following methods are widely accepted as being a very
bad idea and likely to damage your rankings:
- Free-for-all link pages and link farms. These are
websites which allow you to post your URL freely without being part
of any structured or useful directory. Link farms exist to benefit
the linked websites rather than any person trying to use the links.
Search engines hate link farms, and participating in some of them
may cause your site to be banned from certain search engines.
- Buying links. Some websites sell links from pages
with a high PR value. These can be very effective but they are frowned
upon and search engines such as Google have been known to identify
and blacklist the websites involved.
Summary
To have any real chance of being noticed by the search
engines you need at least a handful of inbound links. Without any links
at all you will be at a serious disadvantage. The more genuine inbound
links you can acquire, the better your search results will be.
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