subject: Link Building: The Next Step in the Web Design Process [print this page] The easiest way of improving your ranking in the search engines is to let them know that your website is important. How do you do that? Well, the best way is through the process of link building. Link building is the practice of encouraging other websites to link to your own website. If other websites are linking to your website, your "link popularity" will increase, search engines will deem your website important, and in turn, you should receive more traffic. Link building is a time consuming task, and it is for this reason that most all websites rank so poorly in the search engines. Many website owners are unaware that link popularity can have such an effect on their search engine rankings. This is good new for you. Start building your links now and establish your "web cred".
Google, the Internet's most popular search engine, measures a website's link popularity through the use of Page Rank. To view a website's Page Rank, just download the Google Toolbar. The toolbar will display the Page Rank of every website you visit, measured as a little green bar. A website's Page Rank can vary from a low of zero to a high of 10. Don't worry if your website has a low, or no Page Rank. Many websites only have a Page Rank of 1 or 2, but the Internet's most popular websites possess a Page Rank of 8 or 9.
Quality Counts
Search engines are not just looking for the number of links that point to a website. The most important aspect of the process is obtaining quality links. Quality links are links from website that possess a high Page Rank. Obtaining a link from a website with a high Page Rank is best, although any site with 1 or above is beneficial. Search engines also consider the theme of a website which links to you. It is best to get links from websites that are associated with the industry in which you do business. For example, my trade is website design; therefore, I work to obtain the majority of my links from other web design related websites.
Getting Links
One of the best ways to advance your link popularity is to offer quality and informative content to your visitors and hope for natural links. If they find the information interesting enough, they will naturally link their website to your own.
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Directory submissions are probably the fastest and easiest way to obtain some inbound links. But, because Internet directories link to thousands of other websites, the value that they can add to your Page Rank gets diluted by all the other links. The one must-submit-to directory is The Open Project Directory
