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Multiple Methods for Cultivating Inbound Links to your Website
by: Bill Platt
UNDERSTANDING THE VALUE OF INBOUND LINKS ON YOUR WEBSITE Besides search engines, the next most common way people move from one website to another is through links on other sites. The reason that the Internet is often refered to a the "Web" is because it exists so much as a web of links running from one site to another in a maze more complex than the spider web from which it is named. GETTING YOUR LINKS ON OTHER SITES If you submit your site to search engines, provided you get good results on the keywords being searched for, you will get good results. If you write articles that will be published by ezine publishers and webmasters, then the externally placed links to your website through your resource box can be very profitable. The resource box is an "about the author" paragraph, that you will attach at the end of your article. If you are willing to share a certain amount of your profits with others, you can set up an affiliate program for your offerings, and then you can rely upon your affiliates to provide your inbound links for you. If you participate in online forums dedicated to a certain topic, then your links placed with your signature can be very effective. If you leave reviews for others to read on sites like Amazon or Cnet, then you will find a certain number of click-through's (CTR's) to your website. If you sign guestbooks with your own link in place, you might be a little disappointed by your results. If you use Free For All (FFA) pages, you will certainly be disappointed. The reason for the failure with FFA pages is two-fold. First, your link will be placed on an external site that rotates links. Your link may only be in place for ten minutes or two hours. Secondly, your link is often placed on a page that will likely never be seen by human eyes. THE YIN AND THE YANG OF THE INTERNET The Internet is a prime example of the benefits of the Yin and the Yang. What goes around, comes around. The truth is that if you help others, others will help you. If you provide outbound links on your site to resources that are not on your site, people will flock to your site to find the resources they are looking for. What is more, if you provide a good resource to others, then webmasters, reviewers and publishers will be lining up to tell their people about your website. Thus, giving you more inbound links. BEWARE THE DEAD END If on the other hand, you construct your website as a dead end, you are bound to fail. People who do website reviews and publish ezines do not tell their followers about dead end sites. The value of a single website is drastically reduced by a lack of outbound links. After all, no one person is so brilliant that they can deliver everything their visitors want. By the very nature of dead end sites, they will not be linked to by others, so their success or failure is entirely reliant upon search engine and email success. If the owner of the dead end site does not send out tons of email advertising and it does not have good placement in the search engines, then the site will not turn big profits. GOOGLE PAGERANK (PR) Besides traffic earned by inbound and outbound links to a website, one should also consider ranking schemes like the Google.com PageRank scheme. Because Google wants to provide their users the very best in information from their search results, Google employs a program called the Google PageRank. The basic premise is to provide a rating for a given website, based in part on the value of the content on the website, and more so, based on how many external sites with a PageRank of four or higher actually link to the given website. To review the Google PR for any one domain, one must use the Google Toolbar ( http://toolbar.google.com ) in their Internet Explorer browser. INBOUND LINKS ARE CRUCIAL In order for a site to get a good Google PageRank, the site must have inbound links from other rated sites. Let us return for a moment to the dead end site. We have already shown that the dead end site that has no outbound links, will very likely have few inbound links, if any. When a site can boast of no inbound links, then the webmaster can rest assured that their likelihood of getting a good Google PageRank or decent Google Ranking is almost nil. In order to build one's inbound links, they should strongly consider employing outbound links also. PROTECTING YOUR INTERNET ASSETS Most people who build dead end sites do so from a fear of sending their hard earned traffic to another domain. Given the short attention span of many surfers, we always have to be concerned that redirected traffic may never return to our websites. In order to protect your hard work and losing the distracted surfer, you should always place a target="_blank" inside of the href tag for all outbound links on your websites. This ensures that a person who clicks on an outbound link will see the new page in a new browser window. So, once the surfer has reviewed the new site, they will have to actively shut down the browser window that your website still resides in. This is extra special good news for people who have provided a great resource for web surfers. The more valuable a website is considered to be as a resource, the more likely that the web surfer will bookmark the website for future use. BROKEN LINKS ARE NO GOOD Some people have ventured to provide reviews of external sites or to publish articles that are targeted to their marketplace, but they have provided the information with broken links to the external sites. This method serves no real protection for the webmaster, since the search engine spiders and publishers know that all of the outbound links return a "404 error, page not found." A phony resource is not really a resource at all. BUILDING YOUR INBOUND LINKS To ensure the success of your website, you need to get to work building both your inbound and outbound links for your website. Remember. What goes around comes around. Honor will bring you many rewards. About the author: Bill Platt is the owner of http://thePhantomWriters.com Bill has been a major player in the reprint article distribution industry since 2001. Bill owns a large number of the email article distribution channels that are used to send articles to publishers and webmasters who are seeking reprintable content. Many of his resources have been available since early 2001. Circulated by Article Emporium

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