How to Generate Inbound Links Effectively
How to Generate Inbound Links
Inbound links is one of the more important factors that Google and other Search Engines take into account when deciding where your site should rank for any given key phrase. The quality of the links is very important as well as the theme of the site the link originated from, the ‘trust rank’ of the site that the link originated from and a whole host of other factors.
The best way to attract inbound links to your site is to feature interesting and informative content that people will want to link to from their sites or blogs. ‘Link Bait’ is the name given to content that attracts links. Although linkbaiting sounds like something that is pretty black hat, it’s actually just the term coined for content that naturally attracts inbound link.
For example: The Energy Fiend Website managed to get a link from AOL’s homepage with their Caffeine Test tool. And the Subservient Chicken is perhaps the best example of linkbait, generating thousands of links within days.
Perhaps the best proof that linkbait works is that I am linking to these sites whilst writing a post about linkbait! Matt Cutts wrote a nice post about link baiting which in itself of course, is link bait!
This article in itself may prove to be link bait – someone else whilst writing a blog post might want to link to a page that explains what linkbait is and hey presto, I’ve caught a link!
The fact is – if your site is just like all of the others in the sector then why should people link to you rather than your competitors? You need to give them a reason to link to you. Interesting tools and informative content are things that you should be thinking about, basically, something that you think people would want to read.
If you take this site for example. I would like to rank well for Online Marketing related keywords and phrases, so I would ideally like links from good quality sites in this sector. I therefore want to introduce content to the site that will draw links from such sites, such as SEO tools, maybe some informative content about online marketing, or a directory of affiliate programs 
.
Link Baiting should be your first thought when trying to generate inbound links, it’s free and relatively easy, All you need is a little imagination!
Reciprocal Links
Now these don’t carry as much weight in Google as unique inbound links but can be useful in ensuring your pages get crawled on a regular basis and if done in the right way, can also generate visitors, yes that’s right, real people!
In the past I have used Link Assistant quite effectively. This tool automates some of the process of link building but still allows enough flexibility to be useful. This tool will crawl the internet looking for potential link partners, you can then filter them based on certain criteria and search for information on the sites. You can then send out personalised emails to each partner. Link Assistant isn’t just good for searching link partners but helps you build up a good idea of your competition, and related sites that you could be looking to form other initiatives with. You can download a trial version of Link Assistant and try it out to see if it will work for you before you buy
Buying Links
Purchasing links is a common way of increasing the number of inbound links to your site. Google does now however devalue the weighting of inbound links that look as if they have been purchased, which includes site wide links and links that don’t look natural. There is also speculation that link sin the body of the text of a page carry more value than links in footers, headers and sidebars so my advice would be that if you are buying links, you shouldn’t just look at potential SEO value but also the number of visitors that you may be able to get from those links. This way if the SEO value doesn’t materialise, you should still be able to benefit in increase visitor numbers directly.
You may find that you are approached by companies offering to sell you hundreds or thousands of inbound links. My advice would be to avoid such companies like the plague! This sort of black hat SEO will not work. I receive 7- 8 of these phone calls every week. Common sense tells you that if a product is any good, they wouldn’t need to resort to cold calling to try and sell it!
