Chapter 13. Understanding the Role of Links and Linking
IN THIS CHAPTER
How links affect SEO
How links and linking work
The basics of link building
Using internal links
Link trading strategies
Using RSS feeds
Free links vs. buying links
Avoid deceitful linking practices
Judging the effectiveness of your links
Back during the early days of the Internet, before it began to interest the general public, there were two ways to get around in it. You either had to have the URL of the page that you wanted to reach, or someone had to send you a link to it. There were no search engines to help you find what you wanted.
Even though we have powerful search engines today to help us find information on the Web, linking from one page to another is still a powerful tool for helping your site get found. And links can group together sites that are relevant, giving you more leverage with search engines than a site without links might have.
There is a fine science to creating a linking strategy, however. It's not enough just to sprinkle a few links here and there within the pages of your site. There are different types of links that register differently with search engines and it's even possible to get your web site completely delisted from search results if you handle your links improperly.
When you really begin to consider links and how they affect web sites, you see that links are interconnected in such a way as to be the main route by which traffic moves around the Internet. If you search for a specific term, ...
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