Why inbound links?
Inbound Links are a good option when it comes to getting quality targeted web traffic. Links from relevant websites with similar content can provide you with free, targeted traffic to your own web content. Moreover, even if the pages linking to your website are not ranking well and do not generate traffic at all, the fact that those links come from relevant content will increase your page rank in the search engines result pages. In other words: Relevant incoming links can help you increase your page rank (PR). Having a lot of quality incoming links to your website is the most important factor in your offline search engine optimization you can do to increase your organic search engine rankings.
Inbound anchor text links are certainly the most important factor that determines the page rank of a web site or web page. Inbound links became really popular for their contribution to link popularity which increases the Page Rank value of a web site. Inbound links with the right link text and a high page rank will increase your own Page rank. When Google announced their link based Page Rank, having inbound links became an absolute essential step in achieving top rankings in the search engines results pages.
Basically, the more pages link to your website, the more important your website is, moreover, if the inbound links come from a popular page( with a high page rank), their contribution to your page rank will be higher, this means that a links from a page that has a page rank of 6/10 will weight a lot more tan a link from a page ranking 1/10.
How to get inbound links?
There are many ways to increase the number of inbound links:
* You can submit your website to web directories, some of them are free, and some of them are commission or fee based for example: yahoo directory charges 299$ for inclusion. Among the free directories try to avoid those who ask for a reciprocal link, since these are not really useful directories and the ratio of your inbound links/outbound links is really important for your page rank
* You can become an active Internet writer or hire someone to do it for you. This means that you need to regularly post on popular forums, submit articles to e-zines and article directories, blog… make sure that you are allowed to include anchor text links, otherwise this is a total waste of time.
* you can also try link exchange, many websites offer link exchange services, you can find organized directories of websites looking for link exchange. be careful though, a lot of automatic link exchange programs come from link farms or free for all links which are spam that can harm your ranking or even get your website banned from search engines, it is highly recommended that you check the quality of your incoming links, this process can be time consuming and boring but it is necessary.
* You can also buy links. if you do a quick search you will find a lot of websites that want to sell links, or middle-man services such as linkbrokers or textlinkads to manage your links, the price of these links depends on their quality.
* finally you can search for websites related to yours and contact them by email for reciprocal link exchange or find out who is linking to your competitors and try to do the same or better than them. you can find free tools that can help you find that information on linkvendor.com.
* Finally, there are even links for sale by public auction, such as linkadage.com
Most websites or blogs are not link magnets, and link building can be time-consuming and frustrating. Many websites that are approached will say no to link exchange, but some will say yes. For top rankings, it is essential to manage to have many inbound links.