Website Linking - The Secret Behind Good SEO

The Internet is a "network" of isolated sites joined together by hyperlinks. If no other website ever linked to your site, then no-one would ever know that your website existed.

So links (proper terminology is hyperlinks) are the "glue" that tie websites and therefore the Internet together.

Sure, not all links are of equivalent value. A link on a webpage that is on subject and is genuinely interesting to the reader, plus on a high top-ranking, high visibility website would by nature, pull in more traffic than a link on an webpage that was totally unrelated to your sites topic, or placed in an wrong position of that sites page.

This is a very important rule that a lot of inexperienced Webmaster forget. Web visitors are more likely to click on a link if the text surrounding the link it's related by topic and interesting.

All the major search engines have now started to rank the importance of websites by the number of quality websites that link to it. Gone are the days where the search engines would rank a site based solely on its "on-page" factors (such as keyword density, metatags and the placement of H1 tags etc).

The greater the numbers of links that point to a website the more important the search engines are starting to view that site. But as we have shown above not all links are of equal importance.

Search engines are currently placing greater importance on one-way links than on reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links are made between two or more sites where the webmaster of one sites says "I'll place a link on my site, pointing to your site, if you'll do the same for me". Reciprocal links are great in getting your sites listed quickly in the search engines, but they seem not to have a huge effect on the long-term success rate of a site.

One-way links are unquestionably needed to make a site last for the long term. But getting quality sites to give you a link can be very difficult and exceedingly time consuming.

A tried and tested way of getting quality one-way links is via submitting your website to link directory. Here you submit a site to quality link directories and if your site is accepted, they will give you a one-way link from their quality site. Just the sort of link the search engines are looking for.

The trouble with this approach is that there are almost 3,000 directories out there, let alone the specialized industry based directories. Manually submitting your website to all these directories is almost impossible. Plus, finding the really good ones can take even more time.

The good news is that you will not be the first webmaster to go through this sort of problem. There are semi-automatic submission computer programs out there that can do the job for you. One such application that can help is Directory Link Submitter ( http://www.DirectoryLinkSubmitter.com). This application list over 850 quality link directories and can greatly reduce the time it takes to get your site ranking well in the search engines.

Warning: Stay away from those packages that claim to make the entire process fully automatic. Many of the quality link directories demand a human touch to get you enlisted (this is usually done via requiring the user to enter in a scrambled word or phrase to prove that the submitter is actually a person).

The best types of these submission-aiding programs use automation only to a certain degree and prompt you to fill certain information at other times. This strikes the best balance between speed and proper submittal.