Once you have your website up and running, you may be shocked if, after a few months, you aren’t getting any visitors and you’re still in the dungeons of the major search engines. If you have good content, lots of SEO and a great product or service, what’s keeping you from being seen? It’s most likely your lack of links. The importance of links to your site’s placement in the most popular search engines can’t be underestimated – links tell the search engines how popular your site is with others who are on the web.

You could, of course, simply submit your site to a paid links site that promises you “thousands of links” for your site and hope that whatever they throw at the wall sticks, but that may not be your best bet. After all, search engines are increasingly savvy to how links work, and if your site has hundreds of links that aren’t really relevant to your product or service, your link popularity will probably remain quite low in the rankings. On the other hand, what help is there in having highly relevant links in limited numbers? It is this balancing act between link popularity and link relevance, or pop that is so hard to maintain. Finding the right balance is essential.

Link Popularity – The Case for and Against Numbers

Every site should try to cultivate multiple links to their site. One-way links from other sites to yours indicate that lots of people are interested in what you have to offer, and search engines do recognize this link popularity and reward it in the rankings. Reciprocal links are also a good way to increase your presence in the search rankings. With reciprocal links, you can show up in searches for your own product or service and searches for the products and services of those sites you’ve linked to.

The down side to this type of linking is that you can also be penalized in the ranks if you have hundreds of links – one-way or reciprocal – to sites that have nothing to do with your own site’s purpose. It’s why submission to paid linking services can be a bad idea – if you end up linked to sites that are too diverse or questionable in their content, you’ll drop quickly in the ranks. A site selling baby clothes linked to hundreds of baby product and care sites will do well. A baby clothes site linked to thousands of sites peddling porn, vitamins, diuretics and auto loans won’t.

How to “Pop” – Understanding the Importance of Quality

When establishing links, be industry specific – a handful of links from other sites that are focused in some way on your industry, whether it’s cleaning products, income tax preparation or natural food supplements will help pop you closer to the top in the search engines. If you make natural herbal teas, look for links to natural health and living, teas and natural cures – all inter-related topics that are relevant to what you offer.

Industry directories are also a great place to submit links that are high quality. Why? Because the larger directories are set up with complex search capabilities. Their category descriptions, Meta tags and keywords all result in highly relevant, top quality links. Because they were designed expressly to make finding particular industry information easier, a lot of time and effort has gone into the links and how they are interconnected.

Links are “graded” by the search engines based on complex algorithms that detect not only how many links there are to your site, but how relevant those links are (keep the whole diuretics/porn links problem in mind) to your own product or service. A higher relevancy score in the search engines gives you more weight based on the authority of the sites you’re linked to. Will ten incoming links from little-known sites equal one link from a site featuring recognized experts in your field? One hundred? One thousand? Or will your small cache of links from big, important sites count you out because everyone else seems to have thousands of links, relevant or not, compared to your hundreds?

The fact is, the algorithms that determine which sites are the best are evolving daily. A balance of link popularity and link “pop” is essential to being recognized by search engines and moving up through the rankings. Once you’ve achieved that status, however, you have to maintain it. That means constantly “tweaking” the links to and from your site – fine-tuning both number and relevance – in order to maintain your spot. Finding the proper balance and adjusting your Internet presence to optimize both content and links is a never-ending process that, when done properly, can place you on the front page of the best search engines.

[tags] link popularity, quality links, SEO, paid links, one-way links, reciprocal links [/tags]

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There seems to be a lot of negativity surrounding reciprocal linking by SEO "gurus" and amateurs alike, most notably in the various internet forums. Reciprocal links, according to the naysayers, are virtually worthless because they supposedly do not help your search rankings or pass Google PageRanks to your site.

Reciprocal linking is a perfectly natural and legitimate traffic-building technique that predates the search engines themselves.  From years of internet marketing experience, reciprocal links are an invaluable source of highly targeted direct traffic. Some of our sites are receiving hundreds of visitors a month through our link partners.

The keyword here is relevant. You’ll get clicks to your site only if your link is displayed prominently on your partners’ sites and that they are related to yours in some way. By the same token, you must be prepared to trade links with your partners in good faith, which includes devoting premium space to your link partners and limiting the number of outbound links on your site.

Here are some important points to keep in mind when swapping links with another site:

• Is the site in question relevant to yours in some way? Traffic is one thing, but high-quality, targeted traffic traffic is another. While you can get clicks by swapping links with an unrelated site, you can get more relevant traffic at higher click-through rates from sites are related to yours. 
• Is the site complementary to yours, or is it a direct competitor? It’s not always true that linking to a direct competitor will be detrimental to your business. No two sites are exactly identical. There must be something different that the other site offers that yours doesn’t. Ask yourself whether or not the benefits from exchanging links with a competitor will outweigh the potential harms. 
• Get an idea of your potential link partner’s traffic before trading links with them. Ideally, you’d want to trade links with sites that have comparable or higher traffic than yours. Don’t trade links with low-traffic sites as you could gain more by exchanging links with high-traffic ones. One exception to this rule is if the site under consideration is new and looks promising, in which case, the immediate liability in linking to the site is outweighed by the potential future benefits.  You could look at various analytical parameters, such as PageRank, Alexa ranking, link popularity, search ranking, to gauge a potential linking partner’s traffic. But none of these measurements are definitive, so there is an art to deciding whether or not a site is worth swapping links with.
• Where will your link appear on your partner’s site? Will your link appear in a highly visible spot or in the footer? Footer links will not get you many direct clicks and may not even help you in the search engine rankings. 
• How many outbound links does your potential linking partner have? The fewer the number of competing links, the greater the chance that your link will be clicked on. 
• Will your link be placed on only a single page or site-wide on your partner’s site? Site-wide links provide the greatest exposure as visitors may exit from any page on your partner’s site to your site. If your link partner does not do site-wides for any reason, make sure they link to your site from a prominent place on their home page. Links from "Links" or "Resources" pages will not get you much traffic.
• Make sure that your anchor text (link title) is descriptive and keyword-rich. Descriptive, keyword-rich link titles not only will not only get more people to click on your site, but also will help more in the search engine rankings — to the extent that reciprocal links provide any SEO benefits at all. But we’re not concerned about search engines, are we? Bear in mind that your main focus is the people who visit your partner’s site, not the search engine bots.

Special thanks to Oudam Em of http://www.unlimitedtraffic.net/ who provided much of the content in this article.

[tags] reciprocal links, anchor text, link building, site wide links, link partner [/tags]

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