Inbound links to your site's pages contribute to your site's PageRank. High PageRank will greatly help your pages achieve good rankings in the Search Engines results pages. How important is PageRank in the greater scheme of things? Some claim it's the single most contributing factor to your rankings, some say content itself is still slightly more important. One thing is certain: all other aspects being equal, the page with higher PR will always outrank any other page with lower PR. The meaning of PageRank and the algorithm itself are subject of our "PageRank Explained" page.

How much Pagerank your pages will get therefore depends strongly on your chosen linking strategies.

Inbound links have another important effect: links are how Search Engines find pages to index and add to their database. Although most Search Engines have a "submit URL" section, submitting is absolutely unnecessary and a total waste of time: have just one link from a page that's already in the Search Engines index and your page will be found the next time the spider crawls the page that's linking to yours. The spider will follow the link and index your pages. So, stop submitting and start linking!

If you want to make sure your site gets indexed by a particular Search Engine, simply search for related sites using your own keywords and try to exchange links with them. If your asking for a link from a particular page within a site, make sure the page is in the Search Engine's index, by searching for it.

But before we show you effective linking strategies to get inbound links and achieve PR, a word about an all important aspect of any linking strategy: relevancy. Relevancy in linking is often overlooked but has become one of the most important aspects of any linking campaign. Two factors need to considered:

1. Only links from related sites are beneficial to you: choose link partners whose Website theme matches yours closely. Linking to all and sundry is a waste of time and money but many Webmasters don't seem to have understood this yet. The concept of link popularity, a mere count of the number of inbound links to a page is still being used by those that believe only massive amounts of undifferentiated links will do the trick. Link popularity does have meaning but it doesn't equate to PageRank in any way. Download a free link popularity checker from the Toolbox.
2. The text anchor of the hyperlink to your page can strongly affect the rankings of that page, provided the anchor contains the main keyphrase of that page. This method lies at the heart of an Internet prank known as a Google bomb. At the time of writing, the biography of George W. Bush ranked #1 and #2 and Michael Moore's home page ranked #3, both under the search term "miserable failure". That was achieved by a group of Webmasters linking to these pages, by including the words "miserable failure" in the text anchor of the hyperlink! Considering that the content of both pages has no relevance to the search term whatsoever, it clearly shows the power of the text anchor!

So, you need inbound links from external pages to increase PR and achieve higher rankings. However, unless your site is a big brand site, no other Website is likely to link to it spontaneously. You'll have to give other Webmasters an incentive to link to your site.

There are several ways of doing this and they are outlined below:

1. Reciprocal linking: many Webmasters will be willing to link back from their site to yours provided you reciprocate the favour. This is known as "link exchange".
2. Link buying: motivate Webmasters by paying them for linking to you.

Let's look at both methods a little closer.

Reciprocal linking is by far the most popular method of getting inbound links and there aren't many Webmasters that don't use it in some from or other. In its most traditional way, you set up one or more links pages (links directories) and link from these links pages to the home page of their links partners, who then reciprocate by linking from their links page to your home page. This approach has several drawbacks:

1. It's very time consuming: without software to semi-automate the process of finding suitable link partners, emailing them the link request, bringing on the links, FTPing the updated links directories, responding to incoming requests and periodically checking if the inbound links (so called backlinks) are still in place, reciprocal linking is almost a part time job in itself. You can find such software in the Toolbox, left. We've used this software to create, maintain and run linking campaigns for all pages of this site, as well as for Client projects.
2. Links pages themselves often don't have high PR, so the PR contribution from links on a links page is fairly low and you'll need lots of them. Try to obtain links from some content or core pages as well.
3. Requesting links pointing to your home page will concentrate all PR on the home page. That's a good thing is your home page really is the most important page of your site (the primary landing page for Search Engine traffic), but it's not such a good thing if you have multiple landing pages. As a rule of thumb, if you point all inbound links to your home page and it achieves a PageRank toolbar value of PR, then pages that are one click away from the home page will have a value PR-1, pages that are two clicks away from the home page will have a value PR-2 and so on. To avoid concentrating all PR to the home page, simply request to link to any other page that you would like to rank highly: this is known as deep linking and it allows you to control how PR will be distributed throughout your entire site.
4. It's suspected that the major Search Engines have ways to distinguish between reciprocal links and spontaneous, unilateral links and that they attach more importance to the latter type. Here's a method to obtain unilateral links. Either you or your partner will need two sites for this (e.g. your pages A and B, with C the partner page). Set up the links in a triangular way: A to B, B to C, C to A. All links are now unilateral. For the same reason it may be preferable to set up links between multiple domains in a ring like fashion rather than linking between all sites.
5. If you're new to linking, chances are that your pages have little or no PR and that some Webmasters will feel they have no interest in linking back to you because your link will not contribute to their PR. In other words, getting started may not be easy. A great way of getting these reluctant Webmasters to link to you is to offer them a link, ad or even small banner ad straight from the home page of your site. You won't get refused often using this method. Later on revert back to normal linking.

Buying links

The rush to obtain high page ranking by means of high PR values has created a veritable linking bonanza, up to the point that Webmasters are now prepared to pay others to provide unilateral links to their pages. Individual sites offering links for rent, link brokers and link auctions have become an integral part of the Internet landscape. It's a hands free way of getting unilateral inbound links but cheap it isn't. Prices vary strongly but not surprisingly depend mainly on the PR of the page you're renting the link from.

Dispelling the PR 4 myth

Like so many Internet marketing myths that are being bandied around, this one is tenacious and many Webmasters still base their linking policy on it. It is still widely believed that Google only takes into account links that come from pages with a PR of 4 or higher. That may have been true once but it isn't any longer. Webmasters used to use the link:www.yourdomain.com in the Google search box to find pages linking to them but that command isn't as powerful as it once used to be. Now it is better to use "+www.yourdomain.+com" (including quotes), then click "Find Web pages that link to www.yourdomain.com" (this returns all pages linking to www.yourdomain.com, including internal links). Check some of the returned pages: many will have a PR of 4 or higher, some will have a lower PR. Basically the link will show up provided the page on which it appears is in Google's, regardless of PR

And while we're at it...

Another popular myth is that submitting your URL to Search Engines by means of a bulk submitter service will get your site penalised or even banned from the Search Engines. While submitting in this way is a waste of time (and possibly money) it cannot get you banned: otherwise unscrupulous Webmasters could cause competitor sites to be banned, by submitting their URL. Search Engines realise this and simply ignore automatic submissions altogether. For the same reason, using Free for All pages (FFA) will not affect your ranking and cannot get you banned. Google indexes a lot of FFA pages, so it can't be that hostile to what is basically a very innocent concept.