Links are the underlined words or sentences that you can click on to take you through to another web page.

Inbound Links

Inbound or incoming links happen when other websites link to your website. These are the most valuable sort of links to have for search engine optimisation (SEO) purposes, as the more inbound links you have to your site, the more Google (or other search engines) will see it as an 'authority' site and rank it accordingly. The quality of the websites linking to yours are also important - if they are authority sites in themselves, their links will be even more valuable. A link to your website on the BBC, for example, would be great for SEO.

The best way to gain incoming links is to provide great content on your site. If you give people great information for free, they will link to it of their own accord.

Another way to create good inbound links to your site is to write articles and distribute them to article directories, like EzineArticles.

If you have a blog, you can also create good inbound links by writing guest posts for other people's blogs.

You can also link within your own site by providing links to different pages and different pieces of content, using appropriate keywords.

Building good links to your site takes time. The length of time your website has been established will also help its ranking in the search engines - older websites tend to be ranked more highly than newer ones.

As you begin to build a web presence, you will no doubt be contacted by people offering to swap links with you. It's up to you whether you want to do this, but I would certainly check out the websites of anyone offering to link to you. It's not the done thing to ask for link swaps, by the way, so don't feel bad about ignoring their requests. I just delete them unread, I'm afraid.

Worse are the 'link farms' where you pay money to have your links added to a directory. Avoid like the plague - it'll do nothing for your SEO and will be a total waste of cash.

Outgoing links

This is where you link to other sites from your website. One way you can use this for SEO purposes is to use keywords in the actual text you use to link. For example, if you were writing a promotional piece of content about buying antique dog bowls from your e-shop (for example), you would use the words buy antique dog bowls here as the linking text to take customers to your e-shop. This then stands a chance of being ranked by Google for people searching for places to buy antique dog bowls, which means more potential traffic (customers) to your site.

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Celina Lucas is the author of the Amazon Kindle books How to Run a Work From Home Business When You Have Small Children, How to Be a Virtual Assistant, How to Start a Business When You've Got No Time - Or Money and others.