Web Links

While SEO is very important, the single most important thing for getting your website noticed by search engines is outside links pointing to your website.  The more links pointing to your site, the more important your site is interpreted as being by search engines.  This is known as page rank.  The higher a web page is ranked, the closer to #1 the page will appear when a search is done.

Any link that points to your website is good, but there are higher and lower quality links.  Links that come from “link farms”, directories that have a thousand links on them, are considered by search engines to be low quality links. 

Reciprocal linking, trading links with another website, is a decent way to get links pointing to your site, but is not regarded as highly by search engines as they used to be.  Some SEOs now try to do triangle linking, where site A links to site B, which links to site C, which links back to site A, but it appears that search engines are getting wise to that trick too.

In the beginning, try to get links from anywhere you can.  If the site you are getting the link from is indexed in the search engines, then when the search engine spiders visit that site, they will be led to yours.  Once you are being found and indexed by the search engines, look to get links from sites that share the same topic as your site, and that will increase your ranking for that topic.

Some companies hire link managers who try to get links from other websites. They get a fee for every link they get for your site.

If you want to do it yourself, here are some ideas to get links.  You can email webmasters from other sites and request a link to your site, or to exchange links, although a lot of webmasters ignore these requests, particularly if their website has nothing to do with what yours is about.

You can post in on topic forums and add a link to your website to your signature, if that’s allowed by the forum.  You can also see if the manufacturers of the products you are selling have a place on their website for links of companies selling their products.

The best way to get good links to your website is to make your website something that people want to link to.  If you have knowledge about what you are selling, write articles on your website that people will want to read.  Others will read your articles and link to them from their websites.  Can’t write?  Make a clever video that goes viral and put it on your site.  People will link to it.  Make a clever cartoon or put up an interesting picture, people will link to it.