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Inbound Links – Attracting Visitors Who Buy
Ask Susan - Tip of the Month
Sept 2008
A client asked me to explain the big deal about inbound links. Here is the brief explanation:
Inbound Links
An inbound link is
a link on another website that points to your website. This will refer (send) additional visitors to your website if people click on it. It may also help increase search engine rankings.
Referrals: The goal is find reputable websites that attract a target audience that includes potential clients for your business. By adding a link (or getting someone else to add a link) to those websites that points to your website, visitors to those websites may click on your link and visit your website. This increases the number of potential customers who view your website. Just like real life (off-line) referrals, visitors who arrive from a reputable site consider it a referral, and are more likely to contact you and become customers. For this reason, links from other sites are very valuable.
Rankings: In addition, links from other websites help increase search engine rankings in some instances. Google explains it best:
-How Google determines rankings (www.google.com/intl/en/technology/):
The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.
-PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.
Next newsletter I'll talk about the incredible value of tracking website performance using Google Analytics.
Best Regards,
Susan Hankins
Ask-Susan, LLC
866-380-4972
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