Your site pages are judged by search engines in two primary ways. 

First, by the number of Inbound Links from other relevant sites and second, by the page’s optimization. 

If your site pages have a ton of inbound links and are optimized properly, you won’t be able to beat away the FREE traffic.  Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc will drive it relentlessly to your door. 

Today, we are going to talk about obtaining Inbound Links.

Obtaining Inbound Links is a challenging part of this business, but they are really crucial for your success.

What is an Inbound Link you ask?

So we can avoid confusion, let’s set up some imagery.  We have two sites in our example - "you.com" and "them.com."

"YOU.COM" is our site/blog
"THEM.COM" is their site/blog

If THEM.COM has a link on their site/blog to YOU.COM, from YOU.COM’s perspective, that is called an Inbound Link.  And from THEM.COM’s perspective, that is called an Outbound Link.

THEM.COM  —–>  YOU.COM

For THEM.COM, it’s and Outbound Link
For YOU.COM, it’s an Inbound Link

Understand?

Another linking example

Let me illustrate further.  Let’s say I have a technical blog/site about Unix Shell Programming and I run across a really wonderful reference site that gives a single page summary of a whole host of really useful commands; I put a link on my blog site to that reference site. 

Technical Blog    ——>    Unix Shell Commands

There is an Outbound Link from my technical blog to the Unix shell commands site.
There is an Inbound Link to the Unix shell commands site from my Technical Blog.

It’s two sides of the same coin.

Next time, we will talk about the Psychology of Linking - it is very important to understand the mindset of other site administrators when asking them to link to your site.  Failure to understand them is recipe for failure and frustration in your quest for inbound links.

Till Then…