One of the best things that can happen to your site is incoming links to your site. I have previously discussed the value of links, well there are incoming links and outgoing links.
Outgoing links take people away from your site. Which is not a bad thing but you do want people and the SE’s to come to your site.
Incoming links are links that are coming into your site from another site. These serve several purposes. The first is that it brings in customers to your site. Second is it brings the SE’s to your site.
SE’s have what are called spiders. You know World Wide Web, has World Wide Spiders. These are programs that follow links around the internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc… are always looking for new content on the net. One way they find it is when you submit your site to them. The other is they find your site through a link on another site. The more they come to your site the better as each time they come they look for changes from the last time they indexed your site and may add your information to their data center.
There are a number of ways to get incoming links to your site. One is to use the directories that are out there. Known to lots of people there are other places to find directories of websites that are used like the major SE’s. Lots of people use these directories to look for things of interest. They are usually smaller than the Big Three out there, but have a loyal fan base that is growing. Many of these directories will allow you to suggest your site for free. This is a perfect way to get more incoming links to your site.
The other method to get inbound links is to do article submission. If you happen to be good at writing and have some information that will be valuable to others you can submit articles to websites in hopes that they publish them and along with the article you have a link to your site. These are not as easy to obtain as other types of links as you have to be able to write good content for it to be included in a website and you have to submit it to websites that may or may not include it. I will discuss article writing in another part of this section as it deserves more attention than I can give it here.
There are a number of reasons to get incoming links to your site. First of course is the potential for new customers finding you. Second is that as the SE’s spider the net they come across these directories and index them and follow their links, which means you have the SE’s coming and spidering your site more often. It is also counted by the SE’s as another link to your site. If your up against another site and all things being equal, the one with more inbound links vs outbound links is going to be one that is more likely to be listed above the other.
You will notice a link on the right that says Free Dirctories. That is a listing of nearly 1000 directories that will take your site. Here again like link trading you want to have a variety of Title’s, and descriptions so that your site is indexed in different ways by the SE spiders. This can be a long and tedious process, and again a service that I offer is to submit your site to as many of the directories as I can. I use a piece of software that allows me to put in your information and then use it to submit a variety of worded links to your site from these directories. The sooner you get yourself listed in these directories the better. Many of them have a long waiting list so get yourself included as soon as you can.
Sparky