How To Choose Your Link Partners.
by Donald Nelson © Copyright.
To link or not to link? That is the question we face when we
receive e-mail from people asking us to make a link to their
website, or when we are looking for link partners ourselves
and find a prospective site. How can we decide if it is
worthwhile to take the effort to make a link for such site? If
we look at the fundamental reasons for making link exchanges
in the first place, then it is easy to decide which link
possibilities we should pursue and which we should drop.
So what are the most important reasons for exchanging links?
They are as follows:
1. To Get More Traffic To Our Websites
People just love to follow links on the Internet. They love to
poke around and follow their interests and see where it will
lead. I know this from my own taste but more importantly, when
I look at traffic logs for various websites, I see that link
pages are very popular on many sites. So, if your site is well
placed on link pages around the Internet you can definitely
expect some additional traffic from these links.
Keeping this in mind. When you are reviewing the site of a
potential link partner, take a look at how that site displays
the links. Is the links page visible, and linked to the other
pages of the website? Some people want to exchange links but
they don't want people to leave their website through links to
other websites, and they do not even provide a path to their
link pages or make it very difficult to find. You can never get
any additional traffic from a listing on a site like this, and
if this is the case, you should just forget about linking.
Also, if the links are haphazardly arranged - 200 links on one
page with no apparent order - your chances of getting traffic is
also reduced. Will your link be buried in a huge directory, many
layers removed from the main pages of the site? Look at the
possible placement of your link, and judge it from the
standpoint of visibility and its capacity to generate traffic to
your site.
2. To Add Value To Your Website
Your website is valuable to your visitors if it provides
information that they need. The articles, products and other
content that you publish is your first source of material for
satisfying the needs of your visitors, but the links you provide
can also make your site an important source of information and a
convenient place for people to visit and revisit.
Accordingly, choose your links from the standpoint of satisfying
the needs of your clientele. If your site is offering web
hosting, for example, then it is likely that your visitors will
also be interested in web design, graphics, software, website
promotion, etc. By providing a directory of links to such
products and services you will be adding value to your website.
Just as you carefully consider what products you are offering or
what your own information articles contain, consider the value
that the various links offer. Do the products or services look
shoddy or below the standard of your website? If so, then do not
go after the link. Is the product or service completely unrelated
to your website? If so, then it doesn't really add much to the
site.
A well constructed directory of valuable resource links that
complement your own offerings should be your goal, and you
should judge potential link partners on how well they fit into
that picture.
3. To Build Link Popularity and Boost Ranking in Search Engine
Results
Results in search engine queries are determined by the material
you have presented on your web page, and by other off-page
factors, such as, how many other sites link to your site. The
concept of link popularity got a huge boost from Google whose
PageRank system not only weighs the number of links that point
to your site, but also the quality of those incoming links.
Indeed, if you make a query on Google as follows:
link: www.yoursite.com . You will get a list of sites that link
to you. But not all the sites that link to you are in this list.
Currently, they are only from web pages whose Google PageRank is
4 or higher. From this standpoint, in order to increase your
results in Google, you need links from sites whose main pages
have a high Google Page Rank and whose link pages are similarly
well ranked.
Does this mean that we shouldn't link to sites if their PageRank
is less than 4? Not necessarily. Remember, a page that is 0
today, can get higher ranking tomorrow. Also, just as you may be
starting out from scratch, other sites are similarly beginning
their life on the web and we should take this into account, and
be farsighted.
Once you have weighed all the factors and considered the time
you have available for linking arrangements, choose your linking
partners. Work at your linking strategy diligently and carefully
and you will be rewarded for your efforts.
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Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He
has been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently
the director of A1-Optimization www.a1-optimization.com, a
firm providing low-cost search engine optimization, submission
and Internet marketing services. You can subscribe to his
monthly newsletter, A1-Web Promotion Tips, by sending an
e-mail to subscribe@a1-optimization.com
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