All About Website Linking

So you want to have a popular website that has a high search engine ranking and rating and get those high traffic results that come from being highly ranked for good keywords, but you don't know how to make that happen? Well, never fear, because I'm about to tell you a little bit about how to do that - and it's all about linking.

Linking? you ask. You betcha. It's about inbound links, outbound links, reciprocal links, and of course, keywords. We'll start with the keywords. You need to pick the best keywords for your site and then fill your site with quality content that uses those keywords. Once you have that set, you can then begin the process of submitting your website to search engine submission sites and search directories too.

Then the fun begins. Now it's time to start linking your site. You want as many links to your site as you can get. The more links to your site, the better. So let's look at some ways to get those links and what the different typing of site linking there is.

First, let's look at link popularity. Link popularity can be define as: ranking sites by the number of other indexed sites on a directory that link to your site. This can be inbound only or reciprocal links, but what matters is how many sites link to yours that are also indexed. This is usually determined first by the number of sites, and then by the number of times the site links to yours. Also, the more relevant the site is to your content, as determined by the keywords you initially indexed your site under, the higher value that link is given. For example, if you are a business in the medical field, a link from a place such as Myspace.com or another popular social site is not going to be given as much emphasis as a link from hospital's website or a site about medical articles or content.

Now, that being said, sheer numbers are good, so signing up at all the social networking sites and making a profile for your business or for you with a link back to your website will increase your link popularity ranking, but you also want others to add your link to their sites too.

So what are the different types of links? Inbound links are links that only come to your site, and you do not link back to the same person's site. At one time, reciprocal links were all the rage, but now, inbound links seem to be given a bit more credence, under the idea that if a site links to you with no reciprocal link it is more likely a better endorsement of your site, product, or service than if you two just exchanged links and made a promise to help each other out. An inbound link can be any link from any site that has an active, indexable, and clickable link that leads to any page in your main domain that is also indexable.

Reciprocal links used to be the popular and most sought after links. This was a link that when the spiders were sent out to crawl your site, they found a link on your site, went and searched the site that you linked to and looked for a link on that site back to yours. The spider could bounce around back and forth between the two sites for a time before it finally gave up that leg and moved on to other links.

Reciprocal links don't seem to carry as much weight as they once did, as inbound links are thought to mean more of a true endorsement for a website, instead of just coercing someone to 'trade-links'. Trading links still is common practice and it's not unusually for webmasters to get together and say, "Hey, wanna trade links?" the way most people might ask, "Hey, wanna get a cup of coffee?"

Google's popularity ranking is one of those confusing math things called an algorithm. No one really knows what the algorithm is or how it works, perhaps even Google itself. However, Google has quickly become the industry standard for getting your site indexed and most businesses or webmasters for a business will find themselves actually building their site to Google's specifications, or at least as close as they can get to them, without actually knowing what they mean or what they actually are.

You can add a toolbar on your web browser that will tell you a site's Page Rank. Again, it's not really clear how Page Rank is calculated, but we do know for sure that the number of links to, from, and to and from your site as well as proper keywords are probably the biggest contributors to increasing Page Rank. Additionally, having things like a privacy statement, contact information, fresh and recently updated content, quality content and a few other things are also said to help increase Page Rank too.

Yet, linking and links seems to be the fastest, easiest, and quickest way to increase rankings for your site. To prove this, let me share with you what Google itself says on it's pages:

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

I think that pretty much says all you need to know about the importance of quality links to your website in order to increase your Page Rank and your placement in search engines, the Google search engine to be exact.