I remember sitting in a pep rally in high school as they were announcing the homecoming court. I held my breath hoping against hope that I would be chosen. I knew it was only a dream as only the most popular girls would grace the stage set up on the gym room floor that day. A week earlier we had all voted in homeroom class on the coveted top ten queen candidates. To be in the court you had to have votes, displaying the confidence of our graduating class. The seniors had spoken and they were announcing the winners who would face off in a battle for 1st place for the crown and the title on homecoming night. Only ten were chosen, eleventh place was the same as last; condemned to be in crowd as the queen was crowned.

Search engine placement is a lot like a high school homecoming court. Only the most popular sites make it to the top ten and the first page in the search results. It doesn't really matter if your content is better or whether your potential customers will actually find what they are looking for. If it is on page 100, good luck on getting any traction with it. This is because Google pays attention to your site's popularity. They highlight the queen and the court on the first page every time. SEO Optimization, keyword density, good title tags and great content is important, but Google places weight on how well-liked your site is among the community of your peers. In short, Google will rank your site on how many sites links to yours.

Inbound links are any links that come from other websites and direct traffic to your website. It is a vote of confidence showing the search engines that you have good relevant content and are worthy of a listing. In short, the more links you have pointing to your website, the better your site will fair. Sites that have lots of other sites pointing to it will always do better and stay on top of the sites that do not.

Swapping links is a great place to start. When exchanging votes with other sites, it is important that each link back to your site is descriptive. For instance, you do not want ‘click here to visit amt2.com'. Google interprets that, as a site about ‘click here' and ‘visiting amt2'. No one would be searching that way. So instead ask those who link to your site to be expressive in their associations. A good link would be ‘tips to build traffic by inbound linking' this is very descriptive and gives insight into what the content is about on the website. The phrase could be ‘click here to get tips to build traffic by inbound linking' but only the important relevant keywords should be included in the actual link.

Unlike high school it is possible to check the pulse of your site's popularity to determine where to start with your inbound linking strategy. Yahoo has a great tool called ‘Site Explorer', this will show you how many pages are indexed in their directory and how many external sites link to your website. Visit http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and type your web address in the ‘explore URL' text box. This should give you a good idea of what how you are fairing. If nothing comes up, then you might consider swapping links with others in your industry, adding your site to web directories and implementing social networking in your marketing efforts. Of course you should always consider creating unique and interesting content and blogging about it on your site. Others will pick up on it and starting linking back to it. These tips will give you a start while you build a strategy around inbound links and set out to implement it.

So if I knew what I know now, perhaps I would have canvassed and networked among my peers casually winning their votes of confidence as we entered the homecoming season. However now that I am well aware of the importance of building a network throughout the Internet... what do you say, ‘let's swap links!'

NOTE: if you are interested in more information about inbound links and how to implement them in your marketing strategy, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , we are happy to help.