How to choose your link partners
By
Donald Nelson, copyright 2003
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 Page Rank system, not only weighs the amount of
links that point to your site, but 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 in this list are not all the links that you have.
Currently they are only from web pages whose Google Page Rank
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 Page
Rank 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 generous.
Finally, weigh all the factors when considering link
candidates, and balance it against the time you have to do for
this task, and choose your link partners. If you do this work
diligently and carefully you will be rewarded for your
efforts.
Donald
Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. Hehas
been working on the Internet since 1995, and is currently the
director of A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com),
a firm providing low cost search engine optimization,
submission and web promotion services.
Related
articles on this site:
How
to Get Non-Reciprocal Links, and Improve Your Page Rank
Reciprocal Links: Quality
is as important and Quantity
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