Recently, as part of my quest for more online income, I’ve been using a new and easy strategy to acquire more inbound links for my web sites.

First and foremost, allow me to explain what an inbound link is.  Inbound links are also referred to as backlinks. This is what the super popular web encyclopedia Wikipedia says about backlinks:

So basically, inbound links or backlinks are links from another website to your site.  For instance, the URL of this blog is http://www.onlineincomediary.com.  If I decide to leave a comment on somebody else’s blog, I’d also leave this blog’s URL when I comment so that other readers of that blog would be able to click through and visit my blog. That URL that I left would be considered to be an inbound link or back link.

Why are inbound links important?

They’re important because (1) they can increase your traffic; (2) they help your link to be crawled by the search engines; and (3) the search engines such as Yahoo and Google consider the number and quality of sites that link back to your sites as part of their algorithms.  Basically, Google, Yahoo and other search engines will see your website as important because other websites have linked back to yours. This is all very important if you want to earn more online income like I do.

But you also have to remember that the number of inbound links alone doesn’t justify higher rankings.  The search engines also look at the quality of the inbound links.  So it’s very important to try to get links from sites with similar relevant and high quality content.   A web page that has acquired more backlinks than another one that has similar content will always rank higher than the other web page, simply because it appears to be more popular with visitors and other sites.

Want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google?  Simply do a search of your site or blog URL in Google as follows:  link: www.YourUrl.com

The Strategy

If you’re looking to score some more inbound links for your blog or web site, and at the same time earn more online income, this simple strategy can help.

What I have been doing lately is setting up Google alerts for the keywords that I am targeting.  Google Alerts then sends emails which contain search results which include the keyword that I am targeting.  I then simply click through to the blogs and sites listed in the search results and see if comments are enabled on that particular site or blog.  If it is, I leave a relevant comment along with a link back to my site.  I tend to focus more on leaving blog comments because blogs are indexed by search engines more frequently than regular websites and are updated more frequently which search engines like Google love.  Simple eh?

Although this is not the only strategy I use for getting inbound links, In my opinion, I think this is one of the easiest strategies you can implement to build quality inbound links.   Make sure that the comments you post are relevant and helpful.   Do not comment just for the sake of building your inbound links. A comment that adds nothing to the conversation and is only self serving will tend to be seen as spam and will most likely hurt you more than it will help.

To set up an alert, go to www.google.com/alerts.  You will then be presented with the following:

Fill in the keyword you’re targeting in the search box and sleet how often you want to be notified, along with your email address.

I set it up for daily alerts, because in order for me to get anything done, I need to set up daily to do lists.  Having it set to daily helps me to meet my daily goal of trying to acquire a certain number of inbound links every day.

Do you use this strategy or a similar strategy for building inbound links?  If so, do you have any additional tips that you can share?  How is your strategy affecting your online income goals.

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