The nature of the search engines is that they tend to favour websites with many incoming links. This suggests to the search engines that people like those pages. It is like having many people voting for your site. Therefore the more people vote for your site the better rankings you will have. It is true many other things affect rankings as well, but links are undeniably important at least at the present stage of the internet.

These are various suggestions for getting more links to your site.

1. Good Quality Content. It may seem a bit obvious but if you want people to link to your site. They need to have a reason. In the early days some SEO experts would try all kinds of techniques to get links whilst ignoring the most important aspect of a website its actual content. Successful websites will be those who concentrate mostly on developing good content. This involves.

i) Attractive and easy to follow design.

ii) Good interesting easy to read articles.

iii) Focused on the needs of the average internet user. Make it easy to read and navigate.

If you focus on good quality content overtime people will link to you without you having to do anything. This is by far the best kind of links because they are natural. The search engines particularly Google are good at spotting this. However in the beginning it is worth giving your website a bit of a self promotion, otherwise you may have to wait for a very long time, especially for competitive keywords.

2. Write to other webmasters and comment on their blogs. If you write to a webmaster and say please give us a link. It will mostly likely be ignored. But if another website is very good on your topic, then writing positive comments about these resources will help.

3. Link to good blogs and websites. Often webmasters check inbound links. If you link to a website they become aware of your site and may return the compliment. However you shouldnt just link and write comments in the hope of getting links. Comments should be genuine, links should be because it is a useful resource. To do it just in the expectation of links will not help.

4. Reciprocal links. There was a time when reciprocal linking was all the rage. Some websites had more links pages than content. Search engines became wise to this and started discounting this kind of links. However reciprocal links can still be of some benefit especially if they are on a related theme. Successful websites concentrate on a certain niche. Having links to and from related websites is generally liked by the search engines. However if you get a reciprocal linking request from the best online gaming resource you can be pretty sure it wont help your website on the poetry of John Keats.

5. External linking. The initial idea of the internet was base on the university model of citations. If you write an article and have relevant external links to relevant authorities then you Google and other websites will see this as a useful tool for users and therefore improve the ranking of your sites.

6. Allow people to copy your article on the condition they give a link back to your page. People are always looking for good quality content. If people duplicate your content you will not be penalised as long as google know you are the original source. If people copy content without linking to your site. It is worth writing to them to ask that they do so. The success of Wikipedia on search engines is partly because people often copy the page, and then add the required link back to Wikipedia. The article is duplicated many times but Wikipedia get the benefit.

7. From these suggestions it is clear that writing unique content is going to help in the long term. If you dont consider yourself a writer you may be surprised that actually with a bit of practise you can get better. But you need to make sure the website is based on a subject of your expertise and interest. Websites on mortgage refinancing may offer highly paid ads, but you have to ask yourself. - Would I be able to write a good article on the relative merits of Semi fixed mortgage rates giving monetary instability in the global economy.

At the end of the day you can always just forget all about Search engines and create a website that you think is useful and interesting. If you think your website is good then maybe others will think the same and start to link to you. Some of the top ranking websites were built without much consideration for search engines but got links despite (or even because) of this.

Richard is a member of the Sri Chinmoy Centre in Oxford. He teaches economics and also finds time to write a couple of blogs More SEO suggestions

Richard's Blog: http://www.richardpettinger.com/blog

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