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Using Links For Search Engine Advantage

The importance of your site is determined by linking. Search Engines like Google rate how important your site is by how many links there are to your site.

Not all links are considered equal. It is very important to make sure that the links you have are relevant. The more relevant the page is to your site the better. If the site is relevant the link is worth more than if just a page was relevant.

Here are some ways to get quality links to your site:

Reciprocal Links.

They are not of the value they once had in determining the importance of your site. They are still good but you must make sure that it comes from a site that is on the same or similar subject to yours.

Article Writing.

This is one of the best ways of creating links back to your site. This can have a viral effect as webmasters take up your article and post it on their site or send it out in a newsletter. Articles you submit must have a link back to your site. Most article directories allow you to place a link in your bio section. There are hundreds of these article directories that you can post to. Here are some you must make sure to include: EzineArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and GoArticles.com.

Link Farms

A link farm is a site with scrolling pages of endless links. They allow you to place your link there no strings attached. If you come across one run the other way. They are considered part of a spammer’s network. Linking to these sites can actually damage your ranking. Google will downgrade your links and your page rank.

Directories

Links from directories can be very helpful in upgrading your ranking. This is especially so from such directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. You can also look for other respected directories. Try to get your site listed with DMOZ. It can be very difficult but if you keep submitting it every 4 - 6 months. Search for the best category and keep trying for it.

It is easier to get listed with Yahoo. Easier in one way and that is you don’t need to keep trying. Not so easy in another way and that is it will cost you $299. Google sees Yahoo directory as somewhat of an authority. Your link will be valuable because of this.

Another important thing you can keep in mind with regard to linking is anchor text. Anchor text is the words that are actually linked to the hyperlink. Here’s an example: To download this product click here. The click here is the anchor text. If you did a search with Google using the words click here, you will find that that keyword points to Adobe Acrobat reader. The reason is that many sites point their user to this page to download acrobat reader for free as this is needed to read PDF files.

So now when you use anchor text be sure to use keywords you are optimizing your site for. So even though “click Here” is appropriate at times, try to use your keywords as this will greatly increase the value of the link.

This of course is just a few of the thing that will help to increase the ranking of your site with the search engines.

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