|
Link Popularity: Incoming links, reciprocal links and link exchanges
Incoming links to your website are important.
Firstly, they will direct more traffic to your website. However, more importantly, search engines believe that websites that have many incoming links are of a higher quality (as they appear to be more “popular”) and hence will give them higher rankings.
You therefore need to approach other website owners and request an incoming link from them. It is unlikely that many webmasters will link to your website unless you return the favour. Increasing your number of incoming links can therefore normally best be achieved by creating an extra Links or Resources page (if you don’t have one already). List websites there that you want a reciprocal link from. Then it is simply a case of emailing the websites and requesting a reciprocal link. Not all will agree to that for whatever reason, so you can just remove these (or leave them there if you wish), add new links to your page and repeat the process until you have a reasonable number of incoming links (double figures at least, the more the better).
One thing to remember is that not all websites are of equal value when it comes to incoming links. The quality and relevance of the site that links to you is the important factor. In other words, a link from one website may have a bigger impact in terms of improving your search engine position than ten links from other websites. So, don’t just link to anyone or accept every single link request. You’re looking for quality, rather than quantity.
While obtaining relevant incoming links is a time-consuming process, it is really something you should be thinking about (and doing) in order to boost your link popularity, search engine rankings and obviously your web traffic levels.
|
