By ignoring inbound links, you could be missing valuable networking opportunities on the web.

For most professionals, networking is vital to promote business growth. Clubs, associations, and social events are the starting point of many new business relationships within and across various industries. Partnerships are formed, deals are made, and friendships are formed between business professionals with mutual interests. From an interactive marketing standpoint, inbound linking is very similar to person-to-person networking. Web sites featuring similar interests, services, or products give each other "shout outs" in a sense by featuring relevant URLs to other sites.

The benefits of inbound links (links from other sites to your site) are twofold. Whether your URL is posted on a links page or within an article on a site’s news page, your site gains valuable exposure to a different set of visitors. Better yet, your chances of a qualified lead clicking on your link are great when they are coming from a relevant site.

In addition, inbound linking has a positive effect on search engine optimization. When search engine spiders crawl sites, they take note of its internal and external links. The more inbound links your site receives from other sites, the more popular it becomes with engine spiders. Google in particular highly rates sites that have plenty of inbound links coming from other sources. However, it is important to note that the quality of the sites your link is featured on matters a lot to these spiders. For example, link farms that contain lists and lists of URLs aren’t too popular among the search engines. The key is to establish as many inbound links as possible from high-quality sites. Some linking strategies include:

• Making sure your sister sites link up.If you have separate sites for different services or products you offer, they should all link back to each other. This will make it easier for the spiders to crawl your sites and also expose visitors to the full spectrum of your offerings business.
• Taking advantage of link exchanges and boards.This concept was mentioned briefly in last month’s E-news as an alternative interactive marketing method. Many sites offer the opportunity to exchange or post links for a relatively small fee. To get the best results out of this endeavor, Starkmedia executes heavy research to make sure any sites that offer such opportunities are closely related to your business and popular among search engine spiders.