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Note: This is an excerpt from the 37-page “Building Thousands of Links to Your Web Site.” You may download the full ebook here.

2. The Importance of Having Links

Why should you take the time to proactively build links to your web site? Simply put, to receive additional traffic.

These additional visitors will come from two sources.

1.       Direct traffic from persons clicking on the links.

2.       Indirect traffic from higher rankings in the search engines.

Why will your rankings be higher in the search engines if you have more links? Well, a significant part of a search engine ranking is dependent on two factors called link popularity and link reputation. The higher each of these factors, the higher your site will be listed for each of the search terms for which your site appears.

Link popularity is dependent on the number of other web sites that link to you. The more web sites link to yours, the higher your link popularity. Link reputation is the quality of the incoming links to your site.  It is dependent on how relevant the sites to link yours are and how well known those sites are. How well know a site is can be determined by looking at Google PageRank or Alexa rankings. The more closely related and greater trafficked sites you can obtain sites from, the better your link reputation and the higher your rankings.   

Why is it important to have links from site that are on the same topic yours? Well, a search engine wants to give its users the most relevant results possible. If a user searches for "llama breeding" the most relevant site is likely to be the one with the most links from sites about breeding llamas. The logic is that llama breeding sites are most likely going to be linking to other llama breeding sites, or at least sites on llamas. If your site has two hundred links from other llama web sites and is optimized for the keyword "llama breeding," your site has a very good chance of showing up in the top position for this keyword.

For ultra-competitive keywords such as health, sex, or shopping, if you do not have at tens of thousands of links coming to your site you will have no chance at being in the top ten in the search engines no matter how much optimization you do.

With less competitive keywords in niche markets, generally, a few hundred to a few thousand links should be plenty to drive you to the top of search engines for your targeted keywords with the right optimization strategy.

Additional search engine tips: To learn exactly how to best optimize your web site for the search engines, I have written a thirty-five page guide to search engine positioning called the "Guide to Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines." In the guide I go into intricate detail on how to optimize your website and demonstrate, step-by-step, how I was able to get a number one ranking on nine of the major search engines for a client on a highly competitive keyword that now directly and solely contributes approximately $40,000 per month in sales on one product. And I explain my seven step methodical process that nearly guarantees a number one ranking in the search engines on any keyword, no matter how competitive. More information on the guide can be found at http://www.search-engines-guide.com. The guide is not free, but the offer is better than risk-free and the information contained within has the potential, literally, to bring you hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional sales, as it has already for one of my clients.

If you want your company and product to be seen, you must make sure that your web site is strategically positioned at many different locations on the Internet. Positioning, one of the four Ps of marketing, is an absolutely critical component of the marketing mix. If you are not positioned to be where your customer is when your customer is ready to buy, you lose. Your competitor who is in that place at that time wins.

A visitor can only come to a site in two ways, either by clicking on a link or typing in the address. Without links your web site is an Island, relying solely on someone typing in your web site address. Most visitors will come to your site via links, not by directly typing in your web site address. With numerous links on related web sites there will be a much better chance someone who is looking for the information, service, or product you provide will be able to find you. The more people looking for exactly what you provide coming to your web site the higher your sales will be. Having numerous incoming links to your web site is crucial to solidifying and expanding your traffic base, improving your search engine rankings, and greatly increasing your sales.

So now that you know the importance of having links, how do you go about building them?

This Building Links article was written by Ryan P Allis on 3/1/2005

Ryan P. Allis, 20, is the author of Zero to One Million, a guide to building a company to $1 million in sales, and the founder of zeromillion.com. Ryan is also the CEO of Broadwick Corp., a provider of the permission-based email marketing software and CEO of Virante, Inc., a web marketing and search engine optimization firm. Ryan is an economics major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is a Blanchard Scholar. [learn more.