How to get inbound links

So what do you do?

There are two ways to get traffic to your site:

• Pay for it
• Get it free

I’m going to assume you’re interested in free traffic, so I’ll talk about that…

How to get free traffic:

There are two main ways to get free traffic to your site:

• From search engines
• From other sites

Interestingly, the efforts you make to get traffic from other sites are what will eventually lead to traffic from the search engines. Search engine traffic is the holy grail of free traffic, so we’ll focus on that. And the things we’ll do to make this happen will also generate free traffic from other sites in the process. Pretty cool.

Getting indexed:

The first step in getting traffic from Google and other search engines is to get indexed. Getting indexed means that Google knows you exist. Google has visited your site and taken some notes on it (stored data in its massive database). Whether Google chooses to share your site with others depends on your ranking… But the initial step is getting indexed.

And the only way to get indexed is to get inbound links from sites that are already indexed and “crawled” regularly. When you have a link on one of these sites pointing to your domain (aka an “inbound link”) and the Google engine “crawl” that site (looks at it and sees what’s new) it will notice the link to your site. It will even follow that link and see what’s on your site.

This is how you get indexed. So, obviously, you need inbound links from sites that are already indexed.

One of the easiest ways to get inbound links is to use social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is like saving bookmarks in your browser to visit later. Except instead of saving them only for yourself, you save them in a public profile that everyone (including Google’s indexing engine) can see. And they are stored as active hyperlinks. So bookmarking your blog will get it indexed in Google.

How to use social bookmarking:

The inbound links from social bookmarking sites don’t do anything to boost your ranking, so this is not what’s going to get you free traffic from Google. But they will get you indexed and that’s the first step.

There is value in getting a lot of these links, though. Even though each one doesn’t mean much, having lots of them is what Google expects to see for an “authority” site. Authority sites are what Google considers to be important sites and the content on them is given higher page rank. And page rank is what’s needed to start getting the free traffic.

So, even though these links don’t add to your page rank, having lots of inbound links is still important. So the first step is to get lots of inbound links – even if they are individually each of low quality.

We’ll talk about building authority and increasing your page rank soon. Please start your social bookmarking campaign now in preparation for this…