Why your site needs links

Imagine a house without windows. That is what your site is like without links. No one can see in if you do not have an opening into your world. The first thing you need to do is have people link to your site.

Think of links like votes. You want to be class president, you need votes. You want to be a congressperson, you need votes. Guess who gets to be the president. Yes, you got that right. The person with the most votes.

Guess who gets the visitors. Right, again. The site with the most incoming links.

Before discussing incoming links, let me tell you about PageRank. This is a method of analyzing links so that the value of a website can be measured. No, the Page in PageRank does not refer to page as in web page. That is the last name of the man who came up with the idea. Larry Page is also a co-founder of Google.

PageRank measures the links that a page has and uses that to figure out how valuable the page is. It begins with the concept mentioned above, where each link is considered a vote for that page. What PageRank then does is analyze the important of each “vote”. The more highly ranked (on a scale of 0 to 10) a web page is, the more weight that link (or vote) carries.

Fine. You have your webpage. If your mother, brother, and sister also have webpages and they link to you, the three links are nice to have. However, if their pages have PageRanks of 0, then they will not be drawing much traffic or interest your way. The New York Times has a PageRank of 8. Now getting a link from that site would be worth something.

The big question is how to get high-ranking links to your site. There are, believe it or not, sites that high ranking sites that will sell links to people willing to pay to buy their status in the Internet community. Be careful with this as Google watches for this kind of behavior and can pull rank.

The best method of getting good links is to provide a quality site that makes others want to link to your site. Give them something to visit and a reason to come back.

Write articles with good content and submit them to article directories with your site link in the resource box or included in the main body of the articles. If your articles get posted on a site then you have a link on that site to your site.