Inbound Links, or backlinks, are an important part of any SEO strategy. They are counted very favorably when Google considers your website for pagerank, and is one of the major factors taken into account by Yahoo and Bing when indexing a website. Here are some tips on how to increase the amount of Inbound Links to your website.

Natural back-links

One of the oldest methods is by contacting other website owners and of related businesses and requesting that they link back to your website, generally on the bottom or side of their website. This is an excellent way to increase inbound links but it is also very time consuming and a relatively slow process.

Blogging

Whether you’re using a WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad account, write posts about your own company’s articles, along with URLs back to the site. This will increase the amount of inbound Links heavily. Also, it’s good to have both an internal blog and an external blog that contains articles that link back to your main website, thereby increasing the amount of inbound links to your main website.

Guest Blogs, Forums, guest books and comment boxes

Allowing users to comment on your articles is a great way for them to “pingback” your links. Also, having an online presence on visitor forums will allow you to post related URLs to your website. Dominate discussion forums when possible.

Also, look more specifically for blogs that are in the same “niche” as you. Google takes note of this and adjusts your pagerank accordingly.

Beware of rel=”nofollow in the <a href=””> tag, for example:

<a href=”http://www.irisemedia.com” rel=’nofollow’>Non-followed link by Google.</a>

This tag works well for Yahoo and Bing, but not Google as they read this tag to not follow to the commenters link. Make sure that “rel=’nofollow'” isn’t automatically inserted into each blog post, as that tells Google to not follow back to your URLs.

Article Marketing

Marketing articles is a great way to increase visibility to your website. Publish articles on article directories like ezinearticles and goarticles. It takes some time for submitted articles to get approved. However, once approved, you will see more and more back links to your site as many bloggers publish articles from article directories. Also, due to the directory sites’ standard Terms of Service rules, bloggers will have no choice but to keep your links in the article.

Social bookmarks

By posting to Social Media websites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, other social media users can get a hold of your articles, pass it on to their own friends, and this increases the chances of someone posting about a blog article you wrote, along with a URL back to your website.

Note: Most Social Media bookmarks have NO backlink value. They only increase awareness so that others can write about you, but that’s about it.

Google knol

Google “Knol” (http://knol.google.com) is one of the newest ways to share information on the web. Writing a small post about a blog article you wrote has the same effect as the social bookmarks tactic explained earlier: It increases company awareness to a broader spectrum of people.

RSS marketing

Certain web applications like GMail implement RSS feeds generated by certain websites. RSS feeds are little blurbs of an article with a URL to go to that article. By performing RSS marketing you essentially are not only creating links on others’ websites back to your site, but it further increases awareness about your website.

Video marketing back-links

On video websites like YouTube, you can insert a video, and in the description box, create a blurb that contains a URL back to your website.

Know about Link Popularity

Make sure that when you’re linking back to a specific blog, that the blog in question isn’t one that is unethical, or that was blacklisted by Google.

Add a “Link To This Post/Page” Box in Each Article’s Footer

Many of your readers may also have a blog. Keep in mind, though, that very few of them know HTML. So, even if they want to link to your articles, they can’t because they simply don’t know how to do so. So, help them by creating a link to this article box in your sidebar. It should look something like this,

<textarea rows="3" cols="50" onclick="select();"><a href="http://www.yoursiteurl.com/the-best-article-ever.html">Your Article Title</a></textarea>

Or, if you use a wordpress blog, then you can use this code to automatically generate the box,

<textarea rows="3" cols="50" onclick="select();"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title();?></a></textarea>

Make sure that this code is in wordpress loop.

Profit From Bad Guys

Many of us have had the misfortune of someone stealing content and posting it onto ones own website. Usually this would be through a bot scraping content off of a certain website and posting it onto ones own. Turn that into a positive by adding a URL back to your own website. That way, the scraped content will in turn contain a link to your website from the bad guy’s site.

Here are where you do NOT want to place your links:

URL directories

Also commonly known as “link farms,” this will bring short-term results. However, Google hates when people do this as it’s a cheap way to increase pagerank without having relevant content. Therefore, the time eventually comes for websites listed in URL directories when they ultimately are de-listed.

“Guaranteed” backlink software promising thousands of Inbound Links in a month

Don’t listen to this when people promise this. What they do is submit your website to URL directories/link farms, and that’s not good as explained earlier. As well, avoid automatic backlinking software that submits to these link farms.