Inbound links & SEO

Importance of Inbound Links in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Inbound links are the links which are pointing to your webpage/website from any other source apart from your own website. Inbound links are an important source of increasing your Search Engine Rankings. If you wish to appear in top search engine results for your category, you need to give emphasis on the quality and nature of inbound links. In a nutshell, the effect of 1 quality inbound link is far better than 10 irrelevant inbound links to your website, so you need to be extra careful regarding the quality of inbound links to your website.

There are certain points which you can keep in mind while designing a campaign for generating inbound links to your webpage/ website.

• Relevance: The source of inbound link should be relevant to the category of your website/webpage. For example, if you have a website selling electronic gadgets, then its good to have inbound links from the directories displaying latest gadgets rather than having a directory listing road construction contractors of your town.

• Effective use of anchor text in inbound link: The anchor text should be used effectively to include the keyword which your webs page is focusing. This will enhance the relevance of your web page for the keyword you are targeting, and hence the Search engine rankings will be high.

• Page Selection: Carefully select pages and use them as landing pages for various inbound links. Make sure that you use proper distribution and target right kind of page in order boost your search engine rankings.

• Links from .ORG, .EDU, .Gov, etc carries special weight age. Try to get more links from these websites and you will see improved search engine rankings for your website.

• Constant periodic review: Over a period, review the quality of inbound links, the anchor text, and the landing pages for inbound links. This will help you in fine-tuning and getting improved results over time.

• Avoid inbound links from NO-Follow instructions home page. No follow instructions are given by web pages, not to follow a particular links to the search engine crawlers. For example, wikepedia.org is an open encyclopedia project where anyone can post/edit/delete articles along with web links. The links provided there have No follow instructions thus there is no importance given to the links posted there by anyone.

Design and work on a systematic approach for inbound link creation campaign and you can see tangible result in medium and long term in term of enhanced sales/ leads and conversions.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp

What is Link Popularity and how it helps in Search Engine Optmization?

Importance of link popularity in Search Engine Optimization

What is link popularity?
Link popularity is the measure of the popularity of a website in terms of the incoming links it has got. This is the measure of how many domains / websites have a LINK reference for a particular website.

Most of the major search engines now have crawler based mechanism to assign rankings to any website in search results for keywords. Therefore link popularity has become an important concept as it plays a vital role in getting higher ranks in search results. Crawler based search engines love to hear from others. They do not have much interest in what you are boasting of yourself. This concept makes Link Popularity, an important aspect in Organic Search Engine Optimization. More the other websites refer you; more popular are you in the eyes of search engines.

I will quote a simple example here.

If you wish to advertise about your retail shop, the more effective way is to put up 100 banners at establishments throughout the town rather than placing all 100 at your retail shop. In first case, the other establishments are referring you so your importance increases and your visibility / credibility will also increase thus giving you advantage. Similar is Link popularity for a website.

Link popularity always pays in long run. If you are serious about search engine optimization, branding of your website then link popularity has to be given a good weight age as this over a period of time pushes your website in rankings amazingly.

Conceptually there are 4 types of links which are considered for increasing link popularity. Each type has its own weight age and importance in search engine optimization.

Internal Links: This refers to the internal links of your own website pointing to various pages within the website. These need to be properly structures in order to contribute for link popularity.

Free links: There are many website which provide free links to other websites to make their content look rich and to attract more traffic.

Link exchange: Link exchange is an agreement where two websites place links to each other. This technique was useful till a couple of years ago but due to its misuse search engines do not give much importance to it.

Paid links: Some directories, websites charge to place the other website links. The charge can be one time or recurring.


Link popularity is a tool, if used effectively can improve your search rankings drastically across the major search engines. The quality and relevance of the links coming to your website is important and has to be kept in mind while carrying this exercise.

Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp