The Importance of Links

Unfortunately, the Internet is not a meritocracy. You may have the world's best content on your blog or website, but if nobody reads that content then it's effectively less than useless to you as the site's publisher.

I'm not saying that great content isn't important. In fact it's a vital component for any serious presence on the internet, because you want the experience of anyone visiting your website to be a good one. So you need to give them confidence in your site and the only way to do that is to provide them with great, individualistic and above all useful content. So you need to build your site and add great content each and every day.

This is where the true currency of the internet comes in — links. Unless you have links coming into your website then your site will not be found and your content will not be indexed. How you do this may well vary, but here are some of my favorite strategies (and I've used these to increase my website's traffic 10-fold in the past 6 months!

• Submitting articles to article directories. This is an all-time favorite and still works really well. In essence you write an article on a topic related to your site and you then submit that article to one of the web's main article directories. Personally, I tend to use the following:
  
  
  EzineArticles.com — not the fastest, but it's been around for a long time and has lots of kudos
  
  GoArticles — submitted articles are instantly live you can enter affiliate links.
  
  Celtnet Articles — not one of the biggest, but articles are quality reviewed and they are published quickly.
  
  Article Dashboard — turn-around time can be long but this is good for getting your articles picked-up by eZines and published elsewhere.
  
  
  
  These are only a few and you can view many more on-line. These are the ones I tend to use myself and they've been good to me in terms both of getting my articles published and picked-up by others. Just remember that each article accepted gives you at least 2 links (typically 3) back to your website and if your content is picked-up by others you get even more links.
  


• Link exchanges — whether you do this through a third party or go for link exchanges personally it can still be a good way of getting links back to your site. Many say this methodology is devalued these days, but remember that it's not just search traffic you want... any means of getting quality links to your site is useful and if you exchange links with a related site you will get referral traffic from that site.
  


• Blog posting — posting to blogs such as this one can be a very useful way of getting more links to your site. Basically you can write a post on a given topic and then include links back to your site that are relevant to your topic.
  


• Free Web Page sites — Sites such as squdoo and hubpages allow you to create individual web pages. You can use these sites to write on a topic and include links back to your own website that are relevant to that topic.
  


• Submit your site to Directories — this is probably not as important as it used to be, but some directories such as DMOZ have a high traffic ranking and can be beneficial.
  


• Blog Comments — Commenting on onthers' blogs or on on-line forums can be an excellent way of disseminating your website's URL. You will increase your traffic both by the virtue that there are more links pointing to your site and by people coming across your URL 'by accident'.
  

These are just some of the ideas of the ways that you can help get more links to your site. And the truth is that I tend to spend at least 2 hours a day on getting links. In the end though the processes above can be considered as 'priming the pump'. You need enough links into your site for your site and its contents to get on the search engines' radar. But, eventually, if you have good content, then you will start to develop good links back to your site as other webmasters and bloggers mention your site and give you links back to it.

These are just some ideas about how you can improve the links to your site. You can read more about this in the article: How to Improve your Google Ranking.

If you are truly serious about improving your search engine rankings and your traffic then you really need to check out: The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. And whilst you're there, why not sign-up for the free six-part eCourse.