Online marketing and search engine optimization consultants talk A LOT about website links and why you need to pay attention to them and optimize them.

But while they talk a lot, and blog a lot, and write a lot, they use a lot of jargon and technical speak that can be really hard to understand if you’re new to link building and link optimization.

Today, I’m sharing with you the real story about inbound links, outbound links, and internal links, why you need them, what they do for you, and how they are different.

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Everyday I get at least 2-3 email messages from someone requesting a link exchange to help with their search engine rankings. I think most of these emails are auto-generated by overseas link building companies who have harvested our company’s main email address off of our website.

Cultivating inbound links is very important to search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine rankings, but these repeated requests are simply SPAM. I never respond to these requests and I also flag the emails as SPAM to our internet service provider. Participating in link exchanges with questionable websites can have detrimental effects on your own website, so beware.

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When determining your search engine results, one of the criteria used by the search engines is the number of links you have on your site. They look at:

• Inbound links: Links to your website from external sources.
• Outbound links: Links to other sites from your website.
• Internal links: Links between individual pages on your website.

Search engines also look at the quality of this links. Check out the blog post I wrote on link quality titled: Don’t Let Your Site Hang Out On The Wrong Side Of The Tracks.

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Link building is an important part of search engine optimization strategy.

Inbound, outbound, and internal links are important factors in the calculation of your website page rankings with the search engines.

Unfortunately what most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t understand is that not all links are created equal. In fact, some links can help your website and some links can hurt your website.

Think of it like this: Associating your website with links to low quality websites like link farms, links that are misleading, links that are irrelevant, or links that are broken is like hanging out in the bad neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks.

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You may have read this headline and thought to yourself, “Wait… A link is a link right? What’s the difference?”

Well, believe it or not, there actually is a huge difference between the type of links that can help your website with your search engine ranking and the type of links that can hurt your search engine ranking.

Links that help your website:

Good links are links to or from other high quality websites that have been deemed as valuable by the search engines. Links from authority websites help increase your search engine results, and help you get found more often. The same is true for industry-related websites that are updated frequently with fresh content.

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