So – what is linking?  Very simply, it’s where you insert hyperlinks from your website to other website pages you like, and conversely, where websites are also linked back to your website.

This is one of the ways that your website earns a high authoritative reputation. In truth, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages, and spiders track the links when indexing the Web. The more websites that link to you, the quicker spiders (search engines) will find your website.

If your website doesn’t have outside links to you, then it may take ages for search engines to find your website. Even if they do find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings, because the superiority and magnitude of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

Inbound and Outbound Links:

There are two types of links that are valuable for SEO - inbound and outbound links:

Outbound links are links that start from your website and lead to another one.

Inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external website to yours.

As an example, if ABC.com links to YourWebsite.com, the link from ABC.com is an inbound link for YourWebsite.com. Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your website among the Web audience.

All backlinks are NOT equal. There are good and bad backlinks.

Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from websites with similar themes. These links boost your search engine rankings.

Bad backlinks come from suspicious places - like link farms - and are something to be avoided. Search Engines have labeled these links as cheating and will punish your rank if you have them.

If you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, we recommend that you send the Webmaster an email asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don't worry…  Purchasing links is an established ethical practice and if you are serious about getting your website ranked at the top, you may want to consider it.

Prior to purchasing links, we recommend considering some free alternatives. For instance, some of the nice places where you can get quality backlinks are web directories like: http://dmoz.org   or     http://dir.yahoo.com

After you locate all of your prospective backlinks, it is time to contact the Web master of the website and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – such as a mutual link exchange where they put links to your website on their website, and then you place links on your website back to theirs.  That’s the best type of exchange!  Try to avoid situations where webmasters only allow you outbound links from your site, and they don’t provide backlinks.

Internal Links:

Internal links are from one page to another page on the same website.  Internal links are also important, but do not have as much merit as backlinks. It is important to understand that using imagery for links might be prettier, but it is an SEO killer.

It’s more difficult for the search engine spiders to “see” links inside gradient buttons or flash animations, and therefore, we recommend using simple text links over graphic links.

Link Practices To Avoid:

Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in mass is a practice to be avoided. Plain and simple, it gets somewhat suspicious if you bartered 1,000 links with another website in a day or two.

Plus, search engines are familiar with and keep track of link farms (websites that sell links in bulk). Since purchased links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice results in downgrades by search engines. So our recommendation is to avoid dealing with link farms - it simply seems as if it can cause a lot more harm than good.

“Web Spammers are similar to link farms, and we also recommend avoiding doing business with web spammers – aka "bad guys".

Finally, be cognizant of the ratio between your inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times the amount of your inbound links, this is not a good ratio, although it somewhat varies on a case by case basis. If you have a website that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

Enough about links and linking!  Let’s move on to Meta Tags!  (note the link!!)

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