When search engine robots look at your site, one of criteria for ranking you is your in-going and out-going links. However, when looking at that they also look at site you're linking with. If it is a link farm, they penalize your site for linking with it. These robots have become much more intelligent in their ranking criteria than you realize. Personally, I'm glad for it! Otherwise, link farms would always rank highest in all search engines and I find little to no value in those sites. Hopefully, you're like me and you want sites that hold content rather than fluff.

Now, to answer your question about how you find sites to link with. Previously, you did have to search net to find good sites, send them an email, hope that someone read your email and wait for a reply. As you can imagine, this was not only time consuming, it was tiring, unproductive and yielded few responses. Luckily, because my website was built using Site Build It! Value Exchange reciprocal linking tool was included free of charge. I am passing along this amazing and free tool to you. Trust me, you will thank me for this! I was completely blown away with how easy it was to use and amazing response I received!

How complicated and time consuming is this? Not at all! What you do is input simple information requested (URL, keywords, site description, etc) and click to register and search for value exchanges. You will receive a list of sites you matched keywords with, along with emails from members who want to exchange with you. Review your list of sites received, decide whether you'd like to exchange with them and if you do, an automatic email is sent to them, requesting a link. It's really that easy!

Check out Value Exchange today! Before I took part in Value Exchange, my site ranking was 3.7 million out of 16.5+ million total sites. In less than three weeks Ideas For Home Businesses Alexa ranking was 275 thousand and it's climbing every day. That put IFHB in top 3%! Aside from Value Exchange, I owe popularity of IFHB to Site Build It! and great resources that came along with it. Yes, I did work and am dedicated to IFHB but Site Build It! made it easier and much more enjoyable than I thought possible!

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There are several ways to get inbound links, among them writing articles that include your bylines with a link to your page, exchanging links, and listing your site in directories.

Listing your sites in good directories is probably best way to get quality links that are highly valued by search engines. Since directories rely on human editors who enforce strict criteria to list a site, and since directories organize information in highly focused categories, they are an invaluable resource for search engines to measure quality and relevance of a web page.

In summary, directories are important not because they generate significant traffic (they don't), but because they are given great importance by search engines to qualify and rank web pages, and to determine their topical relevance.

You should definitely list your site with quality directories if you want to increase your chances of success with search engines.