Learning to take advantage of links to your website from other sites for SEO

Getting other sites to link to your website is one of the primary factor in determining your page's PageRank. The quality of the links is more important than the quantity of sites linking to you.

Better Inbound Links

It's better to be on page where your link is on the page with few links. The link is worth less if there are a lot of other links on the page.

Links in body text are more valuable than links in a list of other links. Links from pages that are more relevant to the content on your page are also more important. In the same way, links that are surrounded by relevant text within a page are also more important.

Anchor text, or the text within an anchor tags () is also critical. It's better if a site has a link to your site with descriptive text within the anchor tags. So it's better to have a site have links that say something like this:

Don't forget to visit this site for the best tips and tutorials on graphic/web design

Than this:

Click here to visit this site for the best tips and tutorials on graphic/web design

The title tag for those links is also a good place to add keywords. It's also good to have a bunch of incoming links to different pages on your website, rather than to just the homepage. Links on comments on other websites are usually considered nofollow links which means that it doesn't always help to go comment on a bunch of other sites with your link there.

How do I get inbound links?

You get inbound links by promoting your website. If you have a twitter account, tweet about your new articles. Mention them on your facebook page. Join other social networks and make sure you mention relevant links everywhere. Although commenting on external sites might not gain you a very relevant link, it still gets you a mention on a site that someone else might pick up.

Another way to gain inbound links is to guest post on another blog. Find a blog that has a good PageRank and ask the owner of the blog if they would mind if you write a post for them. A lot of blogs with good PageRanks look for guest posters when the writer goes on vacation. If you're a website designer, make sure you put a link on the sites you designed back to your website if your client approves it. Although this might not yield relevant links, it might get you some good referrals.

Your site might also benefit from a link on Google's Local Business Center. If you create a website for a client with a physical location, the site will appear on special links when people search for say Dentists in Topeca.

It's important to think about and try to get sites to link to you, but more importantly, it's important to learn what makes a quality link and ways you can create quality inbound links.

In Part 3 of this series we'll take a look at what to do within your pages to achieve a better ranking. You can also read the introduction to this series which deals with how searches work and general things you can do to improve your ranking.