Incoming links are still considered one of the better ways of improving your rankings in the search engine result pages. But is every incoming link an improvement? Or, can there be incoming links that will bring your site down?
We will be looking at the different ways to get incoming links and how to avoid the wrong links coming in to and going out of your site.
There are a few ways to get links to your web site, which we will learn about in this chapter, including:
- Using paid options
- Using forums to get incoming links
- Commenting on other web sites to get links
- Building your own incoming links
- Using your best content for link building
- Writing articles for links
- Don't be afraid to ask
Paying for incoming links can be a tricky business if you do it the wrong way. Google doesn't like web sites that use this link building technique and their representative master anti-spam spokesman, Matt Cutts is very clear on this subject.
Buy links and get penalized… sell links and get penalized as well
The major penalty is a very likely drop in Page Rank. Although Page Rank is becoming less important as compared to your rankings on the search engine result pages, people still see it as a quality making if you do have a high Page Rank. Of course using AdWords to do a "Pay Per Click" campaign is also a form of paid links.
If you want to use the sponsored link options to get your site started, that is fine, but the ultimate goal of this book is to get higher rankings in the organic results of the search engines. Studies support the idea of using sponsored links to bring in more traffic from the organic searchers even after the campaign has stopped. It depends on how hard you need the traffic to your site for business, or if you want to go for organic results.