Building incoming links from other websites, directories, articles, forums and so forth is what all webmasters have to do at some point. Every website that links to your website should be treated as a vote.

If a webmaster wants to link to you or exchange links then they must value your website, whether it be for seo purposes or the information you supply will help their customers. A Vote.

Submitting a website to directories will 95% of the time be reviewed by a human and if you pass the test your website will be submitted. A Vote.

Posting articles that are keyword rich and full of useful information will yet again create an incoming link. The article is always reviewed by a human before it is posted. A Vote.

Answering difficult questions in forums and leaving a link at the end will also provide an incoming link. A Vote.

There are many ways to create incoming links and each link that is ever created should be carefully thought through. The reason this should be done correctly is that every incoming link you build has the potential to push your website higher in the search engine results pages.

Your primary goal is not to receive traffic directly from these links, yes it is a bonus, its targeted traffic, it’s free, and without a doubt not unwanted. But the primary goal is to get incoming links that are valued high and related to your website theme. These links like I said earlier are like votes and the more high valued votes you have the more important your website becomes in the eyes of the search engines. This then pushes your website up the rankings and the traffic that can be obtained from the search engines is much greater than the incoming links that you have created.

The Value of Incoming Links

The value of incoming links can vary tremendously and this is why time well spent researching and planning your links will make all the difference when trying to reach the top of search engines. It is quite easy to rank high for a profitable long tail keyword with only 20 high valued incoming links. The less profitable a keyword is then the more high valued incoming links that are needed.

Before I explain the value of incoming links you should all know to stay far away from link farms. Linking to a link farm will damage your rankings, but a link farm linking to you will not, this is because you have no control of who links to you so why would the search engines penalise you for this.

  • The higher the page rank of a website the more value an incoming link would have. This is because the higher the page rank the more incoming links that website has. This means lots of votes and therefore if that website links to your website you are being voted by a website that has lots of websites voting for them.
  • The more related a websites theme is to your website theme then the more value an incoming link would have. This is because the keywords that the website will be using within the content will match your keywords.
  • The closer the incoming link is to a home page will give the link more value. A link from a home page is worth more than a 2nd tier page. A 2nd tier page is worth more than a 3rd tier page and so on.
  • The higher your incoming link is on a webpage the more value it is given. At the bottom of a 2000 word webpage would give it less value.
  • The less outgoing links to a webpage the more value a link will have. An incoming link from a links section with a page full of links will give you little value.
  • A text link using keywords related to your theme or the name of your website would give you more value than a text link that said “click here” for example.
  • A text link that has surrounding content that contains related keywords to your website would have more value than unrelated content.

    We would all love to have 1000 incoming links from 1000 page rank 7 related websites with the link being at the top of their home page with no other links on that page and the content to be keyword rich.

    This will not happen so weighing up combinations of the above and creating high value links to your best ability will make all the difference to your website in the search engine result pages. One quality related high value link could be worth more than 20 unrelated unvalued links.

    Spending half an hour finding one quality link would save more time than spending two hours building 20 unvalued links.

    • Author's Bio: 

    Owner and builder of Seo Web Design Services, a complete free guide to search engine optimization.