Inbound links play a very important role in increasing pagerank in any SEO campaign. In fact, Google's original algorithm was based solely off of the idea of inbound links. The theory follows that the more inbound links (links to your website from other websites) a website has, the more important it must be. When you think about it, this conclusion is quite logical. If other sites all contain a link to a particular site, than that site must have valuable content. The quantity of inbound links, however, can be dwarfed by one other factor: quality.

The all to often-used phrase “quality over quantity” applies to SEO more than most know. In other words, the PageRank of the sites linking to your site is a key factor. In fact, given certain factors (keyword competition, on-page SEO, etc.), there have been instances where one inbound link from a highly ranking site have boosted a lowly ranking site to the top of the search engines. One other factor of the quality of inbound links is the relevancy. In other words, the site linking to yours must exhibit the same keywords your site ranks for. For example, if your site is about “Arizona Real Estate,” then you are going to get the most value out of an inbound link from a site also about “Arizona Real Estate.” Clearly, the power of inbound links in an in an SEO campaign is immense. This only leaves one question to be answered. How do you get quality and quantity inbound links to your site?

The key is in finding highly ranking and relevant websites that allow for commenting. You the read the article on the site and provide an insightful comment with your link submission at the end of the comment. While it might seem intuitive that the site owner would not allow you to do this, they typically allow you to leave your link submission as long as your comment provides some kind of value to their site (aka it is relevant and invokes others to reply/comment). Leave these types of contributing comments on several highly ranking and relevant websites. Similarly, a Web Directory such as Web-​Directory-SEO serve a very similar purpose. A web directory utilizes link submission to bolster the SEO of its users. The more link submissions a web directory recieves, the greater the pagerank it earns. As the pagerank increases, so will the link submissions of the users. Thus, it is always a good idea to submit your link to several directories such as the Open Source Web Directory, the Yahoo Web Directory, and the Directory World Web Directory.

All in all, if you employ the strategies outlined above, there is no doubt that you will see an instant boost in your SEO endeavours. Before you know it, your inbound links will be through the roof!

November 17, 2011