Inbound links bring you traffic and boost your ranking!One time I saw a blog that saying,
If you want to increase traffic... get links!
If you want to get high page rank ... get links!!
Link, link, links!!!
Though that blog was written for general web sites owner, when it comes to blogging, nothing changes!
Strictly speaking,
amount of traffic coming from external links may be small compared to that of one coming from major search engines. But,it is highly targeted traffic and moreover it does increase your page rank. Thus, more traffic can be expected from search engines.
One may raise a question. "How many inbound links do I need?"
Sorry, it's a wrong question. Quality of links matters,having many inbound links is not bad, though. If you have external inbound links from absolutely not related to your blog theme, links are just junk. And if they are coming from site which have lower page rank than your blog site, it doesn't help you much. That said; quality matters.
One way to get inbound link is link exchange. You link to other sites and ask owner of that site to link back to you. I don't want to discourage you from doing link exchange, however, it is difficult and time consuming job. Whenever possible, try to get inbound links by doing link exchange. But you may put more effort to do other things yet more effective ones.
First, why getting inbound links by link exchange is difficult?
Most of web masters and bloggers know that they have to get inbound links from
- the web sites or blog sites that have similar themes as theirs
- those have higher page rank than theirs
The first one generally doesn't produce problem. But there seems to be logical problem when second one is concerned. If everybody wants to get inbound links from higher ranked site, who else is willing to link back to lower ranked sites. Not many, I guess. This makes doing link exchange less effective.A warning: under any circumstances, don't be involved in link farm or Free For All(FFA) links. Once they were good tips to get high rank, however, nowadays search engine, especially Google will ban you if you're involved in those activity. They are not legitimated link exchange.
Having said that, here are 4 tips to get inbound links other than link exchange.
- Submit your blog and/or RSS feed to blog search engine and directories
It does bring you small amount of traffic. More importantly you will get inbound links from authentified web sites, blog search engines and directories. There are more than 100 of them and you can find links at RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites. It says top 55 but if you read on more than 100 submission lists you'll find. I don't think you have to submit all of them, but if you can it's OK. Submitting to 100 sites is not pleasant job. Start from first 10 or 20 sites, and if you think you need more, do it another day. But don't fool yourself by buying auto submission program or service because most of blog search engines don't allow auto submission and most of them pinging is enough.
