The Importance of Inbound Links to Your Website

Links into your website from other websites are one of the key factors that Google uses to determine your PageRank, Link Popularity and consequently relevancy and success in its listings.

Relevant links into your website help to raise your Google search engine rankings because a link into your website is considered by Google to be a vote for your website, or more specifically a vote for the page on your website that the external website links to.

The more links into your website the more votes and the more "important" Google considers it to be. Furthermore the higher the quality of the website that links to yours, then the more important their vote for you. So it's important to get as many links into your website as possible, and also get as many high quality links in as you can, from other important websites.

What form does this link into your website need to be? The best format for the inbound link to your website is as a text link, with relevant link text, and by that I mean that the words that the page uses to link to your website should be relevant to the page on your website which the link points to. This relevant link text helps Google to build an accurate "picture" of what the page that is linked to is about, and so helps build your relevancy score.

But what about PageRank you ask? PageRank (PR) is a critical measure of the importance of any web page as determined by Google, and it is important to factor in the PageRank of webpages that link to yours. But more importance is the relevancy! Linking from an unrelated high PR page to yours will not carry too much value for you, and in fact may harm your own success on Google: if you have too many non-relevant links in to your page it can smack of non-natural link popularity growth and you can be penalised.

Add to this the fact that it also important to vary the text that is used to link into your website to ensure you do not get penalised for unnatural link growth, and also develop links into the interior pages of your website as well as just the home page.

So now the big question: how to grow these links into your website? There are several method:

1. Hire a search engine optimiser, which can be expensive.

2. Buy links into your website. Be careful to ensure you don't set off any red flags with Google, and definitely DO NOT get involved with any link farms.

3. Approach your customers and suppliers and ask for links from them - the preferred method!

Webstarters Ltd. website design and development business from Auckland New Zealand.