Linking Your Site: An Increasing Priority

Most website developers are now spending a lot of time and often money to
appeal to Search Engines. Many pay the $199.00 review fee that is optional
now at Yahoo!, or
employ specialists to tweak and tune their metatags, keywords and titles.
Search Engines
are certainly still vital to the success of your site, but trading reciprocal
links with other sites may now be of increased importance as the intenet
grows by something like a million
sites a day.

The designers of the newly popular Search Engine "Google", which gets its
raw search data from "The Open Directory Project" have designed a
system where the "rank" of your site when called up by a search is now
determined by its link relationships and also by how many times your site is
mentioned or referred to on other sites. To put it simply, Google wants to
know that your site is linked to many sites whether they are directories,
competitors sites, Message Boards or whatever

The logic of this is that if your site is worth linking to or referring to it must
be of interest.
Not only does Google's system rank how many times your site
is mentioned in link pages, but it also checks to see how "linked" the sites
that carry your
reciprocal link are. Sound complicated? It is, but what the searcher gets is a
better shot at
finding what he or she wants precisely and quickly.

There are some oddities to the Google system. If you type the phrase
"more evil than the devil" into Google and then hit the "I'm feeling lucky"
option (a button that brings you the
most likely page Google can find) you get, believe it or not, the homepage
of the Microsoft
Corporation. Why is this? Because so many pages on the net have referred
to what they perceive as the evil side of Microsoft. Thats a powerful, but
unintended effect of all the links
and discussion boards out there on the net.

But, back to your site, lets talk about how you can use links to your
advantage. Do you maintain reciprocal links on your page? Perhaps to
client's pages, supplier's pages, or pages
that would be of interest to your visitors? I would advise you to create and
or expand such
a page. Then, send an e-mail to each of the sites you have linked to,
mention that you have given them a link, and ask that they post one for you
in return. Many sites will return the favor. Sites that may charge for banner
advertising will give you a link for free.

Have you surfed the web and located sites that you would like to provide a
link to you? Spend some time contacting them: the worst they can do is say
"No" to your request.

As more sites give you links you will find that more visitors get to you this
way, especially if
what your site deals with is specialized . Creating links is a way of finding
your "target" audience. And of course, Google will rank you higher, and
hopefully not as a demon.

At artsiteguide, which is off to a good start without Yahoo!, a single free
link from a major
art site sends me one-third of my traffic. How do I track this? I would
recommend that you
get Stattrack (http://www.stattrack.com). This device will tell you which of
your links is
bringing in the traffic. You will be suprised as you build up links to find that
they may out-do
the search engines by quite a margin.

Finally, one more idea. Create an award that you can give to one or more of
the websites that you would like to link to your page. I have an award called
"editor's choice" with a small but handsome banner. When I have given
this to other sites (with real selectivity)
they will often fly the banner with a link back to artsiteguide. That amounts
to a free banner
ad, possibly from a site that may not have linked to you before.

In the future of the crowded internet, link relationships are of increasing
importance and
the apearance of search engines like Google and Clever may underscore
this development.

About the Author

John Seed, Editor
http://www.artsiteguide.com