Why Getting Inbound Links is guaranteed to get you traffic

by Rick Hendershot, Linknet Publishing Network

Part 1 of "Get Links and Get Traffic"

Getting links from other websites pointing at yours will probably be the most important website promotion you do. Unfortunately there is no simple way to get links. Any website promotion expert will tell you the same thing. You simply have to bear down and do it, one link at a time.

As we will see in this series of lessons, getting links involves much more than "link exchange". In fact exchanging links is generally a frustrating and time consuming exercise that bears questionable results.

Remember that your objective should be to get high quality links from relevant pages and websites. And not just a few links here and there, but hundreds of links - even thousands.

But first things first.

What is a link?

Follow up:

First, let's be clear what we are talking about. There are two kinds of links: "outbound" (or out-pointing) links and "inbound" (or in-pointing) links. Outbound links are links on your site that point to other websites (or other pages within your own site). Inbound links point from outside sites (or other pages within your site) to specific pages within your site.

Therefore, as you can see, any specific link is both outbound and inbound, depending on your point of view. A link on your site — www.yoursite.com — pointing to my site — www.small-busines-online.com — is outbound for you, and inbound for me.

What you want, right from the outset, are inbound links — ones that point from outside sites to yours — because these bring traffic from the other site to yours. You must not lose site of this. The point of your link program is to get inbound links!

The most familiar method of acquiring links is to trade for them. You cannot just put out a call for webmasters to link to your site and expect them to respond. Usually you cannot get inbound links, without paying some sort of price. And in the case of link exchanges the price is giving the other guy a link in return.

This is normally called a "Link Exchange". In the first few lessons of this course I will discuss the pros and cons of exchanging links. In the second half we will talk about other methods of acquiring links - creating links. That's when it really starts to get interesting.

Why do you need links?

Getting inbound links pointing in to your site from outside sites serves a number of important purposes. First, links from sites that share your same target audience create an important source of direct traffic to your site. A visitor to a linked site sees the link to yours, clicks on it, and becomes your visitor. Some estimates put the percentage of internet traffic resulting from this kind of link as high as 21% of total traffic.

Why do people click on these links? Because they often view a link to an outside source as an endorsement. They assume the webmaster is saying "Here is a source you will find interesting or helpful".

This makes most webmasters hesitant to give outbound links unless they are likely to get something in return. No webmaster — at least no webmaster who knows what he or she is doing — willingly redirects traffic away from her own site unless she thinks her visitor will benefit.

The trade off is that she gets something in return. Sometimes the linked-to site is a helpful source for her website visitors. Sometimes she gets a valuable link in return. Sometimes other webmasters are even prepared to pay for links. In fact this is becoming more common as the importance of linking becomes better and better understood.

The second reason for getting inbound links is to impress the search engines. As we will see in the next lesson, the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN will rank your site higher if it is linked from other web pages. They interpret links as an indication of the importance of your site as a resource in your area of specialization.

In the next lesson we will take a closer look at how links influence search engine results, and why you should care about it.