An inbound link is a link from another website that is directed towards your article page. Inbound links from reputable sites tell search engines like Google that your article is relevant and trustworthy.

Once your article is published you can help bolster page rankings for your article’s selected keyword phrase by generating links to your article’s URL on various websites.

Building links to your article is by no means a required step and your article may perform well in search engines without any such effort. However, if you have the means, time and motivation to do so, generating links to your article will help its performance.

How to Generating Inbound Links to Your Articles

You can use various sites to provide links to your article. Consider the following sources:

• Using Article Directories: Promote links to your article by posting a part of your article in article directories such as Article Base, Ezine etc.
• Websites or blogs that are relevant to the article you have written: Contact the webmaster of the site you’re interested in and tell them about your article. Note that linking to your article from comments or reviews is almost never helpful (because of how these links are coded), and is a technique generally equated with spamming.
• Social networking sites: Share links to your articles via social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Just remember that social networks are meant more for conversation than self promotion, so you should share links only when the topic of conversation is relevant.
• Social bookmarking and news sites: Use a social bookmarking or news site like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon to share links to your articles.
• Trade and industry associations related to your article’s topic: Email trade associations and clubs that are relevant to your article’s subject matter and ask them to link to your article and/or profile.

Create In-bound Links Using Your Keyword Phrase as Anchor Text

• When sharing your articles on other sites, use your target keyword phrase as the link anchor text whenever possible.
• Contextual links will improve rankings to the article. If you are fortunate enough to have the ability to generate links from several external locations, vary the anchor text you use.
• Links that do not incorporate semantically relevant keywords are less helpful.

When using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to post links to your content, there is no anchor text component so using the title of your article plus a link is fine. The impact on search engine rankings is not as direct as linking from external websites, but having your article URL shared on networks sends excellent signals to the search engines – and increases the likelihood that readers will come across your article and link to it from websites.