Inbound Links are the life blood of a website and the Pathway to Success revolves around these links to a great extent. In a broad sense these inbound links can be categorized under three groups, Good, Bad and Useless Links.
The good links can indeed sky-rocket your website up the popularity ladder to fame and fortune while on the other hand the bad Links can dump your website out of sight in the internet. The useless Links will be of no help or value to you. So it stands to reason that you cultivate good links if you want to be successful in your online business.
Useful Good Inbound Links:
These links will bring enormous benefits to your website. They can increase your search engine visibility which will indicate the popularity of your site thus increasing your link popularity, page rank, traffic and sales.
If you have unique and useful content in your site other websites will link to your site to provide their website visitors a good website experience. This will give you useful inbound links and valuable targeted traffic.
Listing your website in both paid and free high ranking web directories can give good one way inbound links. Some free directories might insist on reciprocal linking but this should not be of concern to you as they are all useful links.
Writing quality authoritative articles and submitting them to article directories and article distributors with your website URL in the resource box is a smart way of obtaining one way links. This will soon grow viral as webmasters publish them in their articles and ezines bringing you hundreds or even thousands of valuable one way links.
Search Engines do not devaluate all reciprocal links. They do appreciate quality, theme related reciprocal links. In addition, it will be a great bonus if you can identify sites that the search engines consider as authority sites in the same theme as your site and exchange links with them.
Social Book marking is becoming increasingly popular day by day. Here you can maintain a personal collection of links online and also allow access to any others online. Linking your site or articles to popular social sites is another great way of obtaining useful good links and traffic.
Bad Inbound Links:
These are inbound links that are disliked by search engines especially Google and can do enormous harm to your website. By linking to these websites knowingly or unknowingly, you can be penalized or blacklisted by the search engines.
Avoid linking to sites search engines consider as Link Farms. These are sites that have hundreds of assorted links linking to each other in a page. By linking to them your credibility will be at stake and probably be penalized by the search engines.
Search Engines disapprove Free For All sites also known as FFA sites. Here you can place an advertisement with your link in it. Your advertisement will appear along with thousands of others and would probably get an exposure of an hour or so. It is wise to keep away from these sites.
You should also avoid Bad Neighborhoods because these are websites that have been penalized or banned by the search engines. By linking to them you too risk being penalized by the search engines.
Useless Inbound Links:
Some inbound links are neither good nor bad. They are in fact useless and of no benefit to you.
You should avoid linking to sites that are irrelevant to the theme of your website even if they are of high page rank. Search Engines are not going to give any credit for this and you will hardly get any targeted traffic from them either.
Similarly linking to websites with very low PR even if they are of the same theme will not be of immediate benefit.
Conclusion:
Ultimately the secret of your success will depend on the inbound links you obtain from useful good websites and ignoring all the others. The obvious results will be increase in link popularity, good search engine placement and great traffic.