5 Great Sources for Inbound Links

Inbound links are a great way to increase the amount of traffic that your website receives and are also a great way to boost the overall SEO value of your website. Search engines, like Google, view inbound links as "votes of confidence" for your website. Thus, the more inbound links your website has, the better it will perform in the search engines. This is why link building is often considered to be one of the top SEO tools.

However, the problem with link building is that it can be quite time consuming, since you have to find a large amount of similar subject, highly ranked websites in order to make your links effective. To help you fulfill this objective, here are five great sources for inbound links.

Yahoo Answers- Yahoo Answers takes on every subject area, as there is always at least one person who has a question over practically any topic you can think of. You can find the highest ranked answer pages by searching for basic questions, and answers that are related to your topic area. Be careful when submitting answers though -- blatant self-promotion is not allowed, so your links must be highly relevant to the answers that you provide.

Google Groups- Google groups are somewhat in the same vein of Yahoo Answers, only they exist as places for like-minded people to come together and talk. Once again, there are hundreds of groups for nearly every topic area, but the more general groups will have the most members and thus, the highest page rankings. Again, be careful not to blatantly self-promote.

Chamber of Commerce websites- If you are a member of your local Chamber of Commerce, make sure that they have linked their website to yours. Most Chambers provide free links to the website's of their members.

Blog comments- Commenting on blogs is an excellent way to build links back to your website. Remember however, that in order for these to be effective you need to comment on related blogs that have high search rankings already. Your comments should also offer value to the discussion; You don't want blog owners to delete your comments on account of obvious self-promotion.

Create a Wiki (pedia) - If your website is focused on a business that you started that offers products or retail goods for sale, then you might consider creating a Wikipedia entry for it, which will also allow you the opportunity to link back from Wikipedia.

About the author: Jesse Hunt is the owner of Dream Design Studios, a Memphis Web Design Company. His areas of expertise include website design, maintenance, and search engine optimization.