Basically it means that a link to your site from another site whose subject matter is similar to yours carries more weight than a link that comes from elsewhere. The “Trust” quotient is a measure of a page’s authority and how qualified it is to make a good “vote” (link) to a page. Certain sites like government websites from example, have a high level of trust. But this is due to the nature of their content and the links that point to them – not because they have .org or .edu as their suffix as many people tend to think.

Therefore, it’s worthwhile expending a lot of effort to get links from authority websites instead of trading links with unrelated blogs. Of course, this is easier said than done as a lot of people would give a lot to be linked to from these sites. But then that’s why they’re worth it! If everyone would be doing it, then it wouldn’t be valuable.

Article submissions are an ethical and effective way to get inbound links. These are sites where you submit a useful non plagiarized article and claim credit in the “credits” section that allows a link back to your website. In this case, effort is required to produce good content and have it approved and is therefore much more useful than services that claim to bring you “hundreds” of links. Be wary of article submission sites that promise to submit your article to “thousands of directories.” Remember, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Sites like eZine have strict requirements for their articles and if you submit a good article to them, you deserve a backlink for your efforts. Later in this blog, we will explore more ways of getting backlinks into your site as well as different link building strategies.

If it was so simple…

…everyone would be doing it. And if that happens, where are you vis a vis the competition? You might argue that if everyone is doing it, then you have to do it too otherwise you would get buried (The Prisoner’s Dilemma). This brings us to the next point.

Search engines are no fools

Search engines are way past the point where they can identify directories that are used solely for the purpose of link building. Directory submisssion services are easily caught out these days. You might actually incur a penalty for being associated with these sites.

There simply aren’t so many directories!

In the early days of the web, sure there were hundreds of directories all claiming with varying degrees of truth that they were the most popular. But with the directories consolidated now, my estimate is that there are not more than 5 good general purpose directories out there.

However, there are certainly some good directories that you must submit to from where you can get traffic and link juice. Dmoz is one great place. If your page is a blog, there are some pretty good blog directories which it pays to be on. In a later article we will take a look at some of these sites. The best ones don’t let you just put in whatever you want, but have an approval process. And that is definitely a good sign.

Be wary of things that seem to easy. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is!