External inbound links are an important tool of search engine optimization (SEO), but how do you go about creating them? The definition of an “external” link is one inbound to your web site from someone else’s web site. You don’t control the content of someone else’s web site, so how can you create such links? Here are several ways you can do this.
1) Write articles containing links to your web site and submit them to publishers online, such as EzineArticles, iSnare, etc. If the articles are well-written and interesting, they have a higher chance of being accepted and also of generating traffic through the links, which will improve the quality.
2) Participate in and-and-answer blogs or discussion sites and (without spamming, of course) incorporate the link to your site into your contribution. One way to do this without it being spam is to put the link into your signature. This makes it appear in every post, without making your actual posts one-note symphonies.
3) Contact the webmasters of high-traffic web sites relevant to yours, and arrange for them to link to your site. You may have to pay them for the privilege, or sometimes you can trade link references. Be careful and selective in doing this, however. Search engines are becoming pretty sophisticated about determining whether an external link is coming from something that has anything to do with your site, and if it doesn’t the link will not be rated as high-quality, precisely because this method is often abused.
4) Create a blog on a blog site such as Blogger or WordPress. Contribute to the blog frequently, and incorporate links to your web site into the text. Again, be careful about spam. If the blog gives the impression of existing only to create links to your web site, that will often be recognized by search-engine algorithms.
5) Write high-quality, unique content for your web site.
This last is actually the best way. If your site is high-quality, people will tend to link to it and, over time, you will develop an array of incoming external links from web sites run by people you don’t even know about. But this takes time, creativity, and hard work, and it also relies on people finding your web site before it has any external inbound links to speak of and thus before it is likely to appear very highly in search engine rank.
For that reason, you would be wise to make use of some of the other methods as well. That can generate traffic into your site and allow people to know about the wonderful content you have on it – which in turn will generate more external links, and push your site higher on the search rankings. It’s a nice self-reinforcing spiral.
Before agreeing to partner up with a blog site or other webmasters, do a free people search. Don’t give your site a bad name but letting it be associated with the site of a dishonest person.
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