Linking strategies

by Lee Rixon

You have spent the time and money getting your site tuned up from the SEO perspective. Your keywords have been well thought out, your text and tags reflect those keywords, and you are actively adding content to your site on a regular basis.

Congratulations - you have made a great start, but there is one more area that requires your attention. It is called back-links.

What these are are other web sites or web resources that link to you. The closest analogy I can come up with in the real world is networking.

When a search engine looks at your site, it tries to figure out how "important" your site is, and one of the ways it does this is by checking to see how many sites point to yours. The more links there are, the higher your site ranking.

Well almost....

Over the last few years, SEO pro's have been exploiting this and there are many sites that have pages and pages that contain nothing but links for the purpose of establishing what is called reciprocal linking (I'll link to you, if you will link to me)

I've seen sites with literally thousands of these links, and quite simply, it doesn't work anymore. The people that program the search engines have noticed this phenominon, and have changed their ranking procedure to check for this to the point that if you get involved in this sort of activity, you may well find your ranking dropping, not improving.

So what sort of links are good?

Well - honest ones is the short answer. Web sites that regard you as a business partner, rather than a link enhancer will have your link on pages without thousands of others - those sorts of links will have a positive effect. Another source of links is from professional articles and the like. If you publish articles in any of the on-line resources and they contain a byeline linking to your web site, those will be positive.

The list of potential links is endless, it just takes time and creativity to come up with good targets. It also takes time to cultivate those relationships.

In other words - there isn't any difference between networking in the real world and in cyberspace.

Best of luck coming up with a great networking strategy

Our credits to the source/author of this article: Author: Lee Rixon Lee is one of the principals at Spinnaker Systems which provides Web related services to the small business owner. Lee can be contacted at lee@spinnakersystems.com and is a regular contributor to the Spinnaker Blog This article is taken from the Goarticles website.

Source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=118853