SEO: Inbound links – key to a high ranking

January 22, 2007 • Glenn Murray

Sorry for my long delay in posting. For the first time in history, I had a long break over Christmas. Only fully back on board today. Now back to business…

What gives you a high ranking in the search engine? Well, assuming you’ve completed step one (i.e. you’ve optimized your website for your target keywords), there’s really only one thing left to do: Get lots of links pointing to your site.

Links are the single most important aspect of SEO. Generally speaking, the more links you have back to your site, the higher your ranking will be.

Of course, nothing is ever that simple. There are links, and there are links. Before launching into a discussion about the best ways to generate links (I’ll address that issue in a post in the near future), let’s first discuss what kind of links you should be trying to generate.

When deciding whether to display your site in its search results, a search engine looks to see if you’re part of a credible network of related sites. This means that the ideal kind of links are those that:

• come from relevant sites (sites which use the same keywords);
• come from important sites (have a high ranking);
• include your keyword as part of the visible link text;
• include varying link text (not the same link text each time); and
• come from a page that links to few other sites.

When a search engine sees a link which satisfies most or all of these conditions, it says, “Hey, this site must be credible and important, because others in the same industry are pointing to it.”

So now that you know what kind of links you’re after, you just need to figure out how to get them. Stay tuned for more info on this…