The quality, as well as the amount of your inbound links is vital criteria utilized by search engines to rank your pages. Inbound links are links placed on other sites to direct traffic back to your own site, and there are numerous ways to obtain inbound links. One way to obtain inbound links is to exchange links with other similar websites. Contributing to forums and blogs is another way to get inbound links, and you can also request that visitors to your website link to your site. Submitting your website for reviews and offering free web hosting space in exchange for links is another opportunity to get inbound links.

Outbound links are also important, and while some people worry about adding external links to their websites, if done properly, outbound links can offer a boost on the search engine results page. When placing outbound links, only place links that will send visitors to reputable, authoritative sites. Be choosy when placing outbound links, and be positive that none of the links you place are broken.

Inbound, as well as outbound links should be a part of your linking campaign. It doesn't make sense to have one without the other. Both of these are somewhat of a life- line that can either make or break your site on the SERP. It would be worthwhile to try and get as many inbound links as you can, not only on a variety of websites, but also on numerous different networks.

The SERP, or search engine results page, is a complete listing of the web pages returned by search engines in response to a keyword query. The results on the SERP generally include such details as a list of web pages with their titles, a link to that particular webpage, and also a brief description showing where the keywords have matched content within the webpage. The search engines construct the SERP once and it is then saved for future inquiries. Search engines do crawl the web periodically to account for new pages, and then the SERP is rebuilt.

Recently, the SERP has begun to offer users of the search engines new and improved features that include suggestions for alternate keywords, images, definitions, local matches and even files on the users very own computer.

Without the aid of inbound and outbound links, your website will not have favorable results on the search engine results page. It is a known fact that only 7% of all websites are even visible to the search engines. This means that 93% of the websites in existence are not optimized correctly, and are losing out on the SERP. Utilize those inbound and outbound links, and be a part of the 7%.