Incoming Links - How to Increase Search Engine Rankings By Herman Drost

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If you saw a sudden decrease in your Google rankings recently it may be due to the latest Google dance called “Jagger”. The latest update appears to penalize those sites that have engaged in reciprocal linking. This probably is due to people abusing link exchanges to falsely boost their search engine rankings.

Benefits of building incoming links

Increase search engine rankings – Google determines the popularity of your site by the number of sites that link to yours. The greater the number of incoming links the higher your rankings.

More web traffic – incoming links from sites that already attract a lot of traffic will definitely increase the number of visitors to your site compared to sites that are new or have a small amount of traffic.

12 Powerful Strategies for Building Incoming Links

1. Write articles – write a quality article about the topic of your web site and submit it to article directories, and ezine publishers. Include a link back to your site in the resource box at the bottom of your article. If you do this on a regular basis you will see a steady increase in rankings and traffic.

2. Include anchor text in your links – this is the text that describes your link. It should contain the most popular keyword you use for your site ie if my keyword phrase is “affordable web design” this is the correct way to write it in html:

<.a href="http://www.domain.com">
affordable web design<./a>

Note: Remove the periods after the < to get the correct code>

Generating links that contain anchor text will boost your rankings much faster than just using a simple link such as http://www.domain.com

Tip: Avoid using the same anchor text for all your links. Try to vary text content by using other targeted keywords.

3. Get incoming links from authoritative sites – obtain links from sites that have a large number of links pointing to them and already get a lot of web traffic. These sites should be related to the same topic as your site.

4. Research competitors' sites – do a search on your most popular keyword in Google to find out which sites rank the highest. These are your competitors that probably have many links pointing to their site.

You can find out who is linking to them by inserting: link:www.domainname.com in Google’s search box. This should return the number of sites that link to your competitors. By visiting each of these links you may be able to pick up a good number of quality sites that can also link to yours.

Alternative methods - go to Alexa.com to find out the how much traffic your competitor’s site gets.
-Visit marketleap.com to determine the link popularity of your site.
-Download the Google toolbar to determine the PR (page rank) of a site. A high PR indicates the site has many links pointing to it.

5. Use the same URL format – search engines don’t see all URLs the same. Here are some different ways to write your URL ie

http://domainname.com
http://domainname.com/
http://domainname/index.html
http://www.domainname.com
http://www.domainname.com/
http://www.domainname.com/index.html

These are all different URLS even though though they all point to the same web page. If sites that link to you use all different URLS, it will decrease your web page relevancy.

Try to stick to one format ie http://www.yourdomain.com to gain maximum page rankings.

Part 2
To read points 6-12 of this article, visit:
http://www.isitebuild.com/incoming-links


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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of Maryland Web Design, Hosting, Marketing To subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter and for more original in-depth articles visit: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles