To be honest I never could quite figure this Google thing out, how it ranks good sites from bad sites. One day it all clicked for me and its so simple when you look at it from Google’s point of view. Google keeps its customers by providing relevant sites to your search queries. How does it choose best sites for what you are looking for? Well, first of all it needs to be relevant (key words) and secondly it needs to be useful and of high quality. One way Google knows to measure quality is by amount of links referring to your site. It stands to reason a site referred to by 100 websites may be more useful than a site referred by just a few right?

So how can we increase our sites chances of shooting up search engine rankings with incoming links?

The quality of links you receive is very important. Choose websites that firstly are related and preferably with a higher page rank than your site. The higher quality link higher page rank you will receive. In other words getting a link from Amazon.com is going to be worth more than a link on your daughters home page.

Basically there are 3 types of links, Outbound links which are easily added to your site, Reciprocal links where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A, and finally inbound links. These inbound links are most important of all.

Let me describe how to get links in order of their importance.

How to get incoming links

1.Write articles like this one. Choose a topic you know and write up a short 500 word articles with a link back to your website and post it to article directories. Not only are these one-way links but other websites will pick it up and post one way links on their websites. Google gives you a big tick for each one way link!

It’s no SEO secret that inbound links to your site are an important part of any complete search engine positioning strategy. You’ve undoubtedly received numerous emails touting benefits of exchanging links with other websites. Provided that sites are related, reciprocal linking can definitely help you in your quest for higher rankings however, establishing quality non-reciprocal links to your website will provide added weight and many of tactics used in developing these links have built-in relevancy.

There are two main advantages to non-reciprocal links as opposed to reciprocal links. The first is that these links will hold more weight, as they aren’t reciprocated (the search engines can detect whether links are reciprocal). The second advantage is that they don’t have to be monitored as closely as reciprocal links. With reciprocal links one has to be aware of unethical webmasters who will take links down or use other tactics to insure that search engines don’t see links pages. You have to be aware of these events so that you can remove their links from your site if warranted however with non-reciprocal links you don’t have to be as concerned as you’re not linking to them.

These are far from only benefits of non-reciprocal link building but they are two of most beneficial for your site and for you as its webmaster. But how do you get something for nothing? Why would someone want to link to you in exchange for no links back? Keep in mind acronym TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). In short, you’re not going to get something for nothing but it’s well worth “something” you’ll have to put in.

So non-reciprocal links are beneficial to your search engine positioning campaign … but how do you do it? There are a number of tactics that will work. Here are a few of more successful:

Write Good Content It’s shocking but some people will actually link to your site because it is a valuable resource that their visitors may find interesting or useful. The search engines initially gave incoming links value based on belief that sites with incoming links tended to be sites that others find worth linking to. People actually linked to sites simply because they found content useful. Believe it or not this practice still exists today.

If you have a quality site with great content, preferably updated regularly, others in your industry should naturally link to you. It’s also appropriate to ask other webmasters to link to your site either through direct contact or by posting a page on your site, which provides images and/or link details. If you get even one link out of your efforts it was worth 5 or so minutes it should take to put up page.

Directory Listings Provided that you’re willing to invest a bit of time and money, directory listings are probably easiest way to get non-reciprocal links. Provided that you’re site has some value to it and is not offensive, most directories will list it though usually there is a “review fee” involved.

There are well know directories such as Yahoo! Directory (http://dir.yahoo.com/) however you may find that price tag for a guaranteed review from Yahoo! at $299 to be a bit more than you wanted to spend for a single listing. Another “major player” in directory world is Open Directory Project (or DMOZ) (http://www.dmoz.org/) however you may find that with volunteer editors, your site can take many months to get listed, if at all.

Fortunately there are many “secondary” directories and there are also literally thousands of topic-specific directories that can provide valuable listings. In fact, topic-specific directory listings can in many ways be considered more valuable in that link to your site is entirely relevant and also, you should get some quality targeted traffic from your listing provided that directory itself ranks well.