Business, economic development - the unofficial Chamber of Commerce

A proven method in the modern search engine optimization world
without any doubt is how successfully you create a powerful
network of links pointing at your website. Google specifically
and other leading search engines nowadays put emphasis on the
number and quality of links that directly or indirectly shoot at
your website.

It’s not a couple of years ago that all you had to do was making
web pages loaded with keywords or what is called keyword rich
web pages, at present if you want to appear on first pages of
search engines, you necessarily have to have valuable, high
quality links to your website, and this can be done in several
methods.

Some people think that Ok, yesterday we registered a domain, and
today we set up our web hosting account and tomorrow we buy
links from so many websites offering text links or banner links
and so the next week we are in the top ten results of search
engines and two weeks from now, we will be circled by thousands
of visitors to our website and so our newly launched business
will skyrocket.

Unfortunately or fortunately this is not the case, time is
needed, and you have to be very smart and patient at the same
time, it’s a general belief among leading online web marketing
experts that you shouldn’t expect a miracle to happen in the
first six months of being online.

The reason is that search engines in addition to the number of
links established to your site, they calculate the lifespan of
the links as well. For example, links that you buy or other
webmasters exchange with you are nice but their powerful effect
appears after usually three months of establishment.

So, please be patient and look for quality links. For instance
if you set up a web business about website design, try to
exchange or buy links with other webmasters in the same related
field, how on earth a link from a website that sells books can
help your web ranking in search engines? The other case is true
as well, only 5 quality links from related websites are much
better than hundreds of links from unrelated sources.

By quality, I mean links that come from authoritative sources
and websites, as you know the importance of links is measured
through pagerank, for example 5 links with pageranks of 5 are
much better than 10 links of pagerank 2. Please note that
monthly links are not very much helpful, so if you buy text
links make sure you order for several month, or when you decide
exchanging links with other webmasters, make sure you both are
determined to display each other links for years to come, and
this is the place where the importance of yearly links and
permanent links are eminent.

As you might know there are certain related websites called
directories that offer permanent or yearly based subscriptions,
links from these websites are very helpful. But there is a minor
hidden fact that some directories are called link farms because
they do not have any contents except for links, so be aware as
to where your links appear on, on useful related directories
that contain useful content as well as links or merely some
websites that are loaded with thousands of links, stay away from
such artificial link building strategies.

Another very important note about establishing links is how the
actual link points at your website, as in our previous example,
if you want to pay for a link to point at your website design
related website, arrange the format of the link in a way that
the anchor text or the clickable part of the link contains the
words website design and not necessarily your website name, this
is a proven method.

The other note that can be mentioned in here is the number of
links per page, for example if another webmaster put your link
on a page with 20 other links, this is nice and acceptable but
if your link is seen on a page among 150 other links, you see
this is not recommended.

Search engine friendly pages too are very important, make sure
your link appears on pages that are indexed by search engines
easily, how, if the link Url contains only your real Url, this
is great but if the link is established through programming
codes, not very much useful.

Link Popularity is the one of the most important attribute for
the SEO. Link Popularity means popularizing a
particular link of the website for top search engine web
rankings. Nowadays Link Popularity is being considered to be the
most important process for the search engine optimization. Good
ranks are completely impossible without the effective Link
Popularity Plan.

There are some Link Popularity methods: Link popularity
can be done through different methods like:

* Reciprocal Link Exchange among websites * Posting messages of
your website to the various message boards and guest books *
Publishing article about your website or company in other
websites. To increase the Link Popularity it is necessary to
conduct the Link Exchange Program:

* The First and foremost step of this program is to look out for
the websites that are relatively equal to that of your site. It
means to exchange the links with the sites which have the same
purpose of work. * Always exchange the Link with the Higher
Google PR of 4. * Check the details of the site with which
exchange process are going on. * Create an HTML page in which
the details of the link partners should be mentioned. * Prepare
a link code of the website that you would have to submit or send
through a form to the perspective partner. * Most importantly
try to get more inbound links rather than outbound links for
your site. * After preparing the Link code approach to the
perspective link partners through Email. * Lastly submit these
Link Pages to the Search Engines- Google.

Through these steps one can easily increase the Link Popularity
of the site.

If you maintain a website online seek to market it, you may have
been told or even offered reciprocal links. Most advertisements
promise that such a venture can get more people to go to your
site, raise your search engine rankings, and add to consumer and
surfer interest in your product, service, or craft.

What are reciprocal links?

Reciprocal linking, as the name implies, is just exchanging
links with a website selling products or services similar to
yours. They will promise to post your link on their site if you
promise to post their link on yours. Visitors to your site will
most likely visit theirs, and visitors to their site will most
likely visit yours.

Just how effective are reciprocal links? Are they all hype? Are
you, as the careful web designer and developer, being told
everything about them?

The aim of most reciprocal link exchangers is to increase their
site’s search engine rankings. However, according to a study,
finding sites on search engines contributes only about 15% to a
website’s traffic. Reciprocal linking, then, will not get you
traffic through search engine ranking.

So what purpose does reciprocal linking serve? It can get you
traffic, but only and mostly if people click on your site’s link
from someone else’s site.

How can you substantially increase your traffic through
reciprocal linking? If your link appears in as many other sites
as possible. This will mean that you have to list a great number
of links yourself ñ but if you have a lot of useful links on
your links page, you can actually help your site visitors, and
make your website credible.

If you have a useful website with lots of links, and with other
people linking back to you, you can get more people to visit
your site, and keep up a good stream of Internet traffic. You
can be famous in no time, right?

Reciprocal linking can help boost your Internet popularity,
true, but only if done correctly. With more webmasters concerned
with popularity rather than content, however, reciprocal linking
with as many people as possible may actually be more to your
detriment than benefit.

Why is this so?

1. Some sites do not have consistently good content

Sure, you link to many websites, and have them link back to you,
but just how good are these websites?

If the website that links to you does not get updated, or does
not have good content, chances are, they won’t be getting any
visitors, and you won’t be getting any from them. And if your
website links to them, and your visitors go to their site, do
you think they’ll love you for linking them to a useless site?
Even your site will lose visitors if your link partners don’t
have good content.

Think: quality over quantity when choosing link partners. But
with the Internet changing every day, how sure are you that your
link partners can be with you for the long term?

2. Some sites don’t display links properly.

Sadly, some sites will not even display your link at all,
despite their promise. And even if they do, your link will not
be prominent enough for visitors to see it and visit your site.

So how can you check if your affiliates are displaying your
link? All you have to do is visit their website at least once
every month ñ a tall order if you’re thinking of reciprocal
linking with at least a hundred sites to get word out on you.

3. Some sites look for link partners, not visitors

Some sites are designed in such a way that they become famous
because they have many link partners ñ but not enough content to
help visitors out. Sometimes, what results are link partners
visiting each other’s sites and closing their club around their
circle of websites.

What happens to your site, then? It gets a lot of visits ñ from
your link partners, who already know about you.

4. Some sites do not have well organized links pages

In an effort to boost popularity, some webmasters can be
reckless and simply list all their affiliate sites on their
links page. Their random collection can give visitors a
headache.

If sites, including yours, have categorized links, they will
attract more traffic and increase the site’s popularity
naturally. Again, sadly, this is not true for most sites on the
Internet, and reciprocal linking with them will befuddle more
than benefit visitors.

So how can you avoid these pitfalls? Visit your link partners
regularly, and choose a few good ones firsthand.

Most importantly, rely on other methods to get word out on your
website. Besides, you’ll never know who you’re linking with.