Did your parents ever warn you about “the bad part of town?” Well, the web has those places too. A lot of people understand that links back to a web site can help a web site get better rankings in the search engines.
Problem is, blindly seeking any kind of link may do more harm than good. There are folks out there that will try to lead you to believe that any link, and lots of them, is all that matters. The more the better, the less work to get them, even better. Please don’t fall prey to this kind of thinking.
The search engines want to find high quality content and deliver it to people who are searching. Any practice that is set-up to trick them into ranking a site higher will eventually lead to penalties or even banishment from the index all together. Building relevant, high-quality, hand-crafted links is work, but its rewards make it worth it.
There are some powerful tools that can help you find good potential links and practices that will eventually allow you to build great links back to your site, but don’t try to short circuit the process with some automated link generating software tool sold by the “Internet Marketing” gurus who don’t have to live with the impact on your site.
- Stay out of these parts of the web world –
- FFA sites that let you create some sort of free ad in exchange for who knows what
- Link Farms that allow you to create a links in exchange for links
- Link rink schemes that aim to hook a bunch of sites together
- Some directories that exist only for link purposes
- Automatic link swapping software programs
Incoming links will help your site a lot more if they appear to happen naturally, come from other quality content sites and are relevant to your site’s primary topic. One of the best ways to get some incoming links fast is to submit well-written articles to high quality article directories. (If you have content relevant to small business, you can add your articles to the Duct Tape Marketing article directory for starters.)
