Inbound links

If there's one thing guaranteed to increase visitor traffic to your website, it's inbound links from other websites. In fact, links don't usually generate much direct traffic themselves (unless they're prominently displayed on a notably popular site). Much more importantly, Google and other search engines look at the number of inbound links to a website, and use that as an indicator of it's importance. The more inbound links, the more important your site, and the higher you'll be ranked.

The question is, how can you get inbound links to your website, and where from?

Most important to long term success are natural links. In other words, those that happen purely as a consequence of someone visiting your website, seeing it contains something interesting, remarkable or useful, and thinking: "Gosh that's interesting, I'll link to it from my site".

So, from the outset, think about what content you'll be including on your website that gives people a reason to link to you. Could be valuable information, could be a useful service or tool, could be something funny, could be a million things.

With a really compelling reason to link to your site, it may be you don't need to do much else. Look at www.themilliondollarhomepage.com. Once word got out that the owner of this site was selling pixels on his home page, the whole world and its wife wanted to comment and link to it.

For those of us that don't have a website that is quite as innovative as milliondollarhomepage, the other way to get inbound links is to ask for them, or simply place them on third party websites yourself.

Before you start, you'll need a tool to see who is linking to you at any given time, so that you can monitor the success of your efforts. For this, use either Yahoo Site Explorer, or the new inbound link feature of Google Webmaster Tools.

Think about which sites you want to link to you. To have maximum impact on your search engine rankings, their content needs to be relevant to yours. The best links are from websites that Google already deems important (something you can see by downloading the Google toolbar and checking the site's Page Rank. Anything above 2 is good).

Try and avoid linking back to a website that links to yours, as it's generally accepted that reciprocal links are of less value. Finally, place close attention to how a site links to yours. Ideally, text links should use key search terms, like this one: creative marketing advice. Also, try and make sure that the websites you approach will be placing a direct link back to yours. Some place indirect links via an ad server, which will not improve your link popularity. To check, roll your mouse over the link and see whether it is just your url, and nothing else displayed in the status bar at the foot of your browser.

With all that in mind, you can now go off and secure some inbound links. Here's where to go:

Complementary, non-competing websites
Just e-mail and ask them to link to you. It's time-consuming and many just won't reply. But the more compelling the reason you can give them to link to you, the better the response you'll get.

Directories
Search Google, and you'll find many directory services on the Internet that you can submit your site to. Some are automated, others are human-edited. Generally, the latter are more valuable. One of the most important is dmoz (although it can take an excruciatingly long time to get listed, with no guarantee that you will be, or indication of when). Yahoo is also important, although whether enough to pay for inclusion is open to debate. Other than Yahoo, there is no debate - don't pay.

Forums
Identify the most important forums relevant to your subject area, join up and post messages that contain a link to your website. But follow good netiquette. Don't just place a link to your site, instead find a thread that you can contribute something meaningful, and where it would be logical to place a link to your site in your post. Alternatively, some will allow you to add a link in your forum profile signature. However, note that forum posts often appear on pages with a low Google Page Rank that is quite unlikely to improve with time. So they may be of marginal benefit.

Blogs
Similarly, a lot of blogs allow you to post comments in response to posts by the blogger (for example, see the linked comments made on our own marketing blog). Again, follow good netiquette and make your comment relevant / interesting. Otherwise the chances are that the blogger will just delete your link later.

Once you've secured your first 10 or 20 inbound links, sit back and watch your rankings start to improve. We can't say by how much. It depends on the quantity and quality of inbound links you've secured.

Last updated: February 2007

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