| 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.
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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 (http://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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