Links - Another Important Item in SEO

I am talking about links. Last post was about keywords which are definitely the most important item in SEO. Now why links are important? Having links is a part of the algorithm of the search engines. Even if you have perfectly chose your keywords without quality and quantity of links, your site will not be discovered and spidered by search engines. 

Two types of Links in SEO - Inbound and Outbound

Outbound links are links coming from your site and leading to other site while inbound links; sometimes called backlinks,  are links coming from external websites leading to your site. Backlinks are important because it is how the search engines measure the popularity of your site especially Google.Of course there are good and bad links.Good links are links coming from authority and legit sites. Bad links are links that came from link farms and other suspicious places. You can acquire backlinks by buying them but consider free methods of acquiring backlinks unless you aimed to rank on top of search engines.

Anchor Text

This is the most important item in backlink. Anchor text are the exact text where the link starts from. Example: Make Money Online. It is the keywords that you click and then it points to another site. 

Bad Practices to be avoided in Building Backlinks

Here are practices you should avoid in building backlinks to your website. Keep in mid that these bad practices will destroy your sites reputation on SEs and will get your site sandbox! 

•  do not purchase too many links - you can get your website sandbox if you purchase a thousand links in a day.
• avoid outbound links to bad sites. It will destroy your reputation on Search Engines because these sites are disliked by the SEs
• do not participate in exchanging links.There are three reasons why you should not do this. First is you are not sure how long will your link appear on other sites. Second, the context the link appears may have been changed by the site owner. It is suspicious if most of the links from your site are from link ecxhanges.
• always balance the ratio of inbound and outbound links.