Website Links
Website Links are part of the natural way the Internet grew up
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Website Promotion 2 - Website Links
The website link - a natural way to connect
A whole industry has grown up around website links. Most of them exist for one main reason: to impress the search engines with how important the linked-to website really is.
It's a pity that all this effort spent on creating website links is not spent on improving our websites, or providing other useful web material. All web users would benefit from better web content, and the linking would take care of itself, as it always did.
After all, webmasters and other web users are naturally inclined to link to interesting content. And webmasters always used to seek quality inbound links (i.e. from popular sites in a related field) to direct web surfers to their own website.
Artificial Popularity
Unfortunately, by ranking websites on the basis of their website links, search engines have introduced a distortion into what was a healthy and useful activity, but has now become a morbid one.
Webmasters now try to create thousands of unearned, inbound links for their websites, including many that web surfers will almost never find or follow, so that their website will gain a top place in the search engine rankings. The strategy becomes self-defeating as everybody adopts it.
It creates a problem for the search engines too. Interesting and useful websites may be poorly ranked by search engines, unless they have an impressive number of links. Less informative sites, that are artificially stacked with inbound links may get promoted to the top of the search pages instead. This is not in the web community's long-term interest, and the search engines must be very aware of this.
Search engines have responded by examining the quality and number of inbound links, looking for unnatural patterns. They are getting better at it every day.
When they find a suspicious linking pattern, they give no benefit for those links to the websites involved. In fact they may apply penalties - ranging from reducing a website's ranking, to removing a site completely from their index.
This is not something you want to happen to your website!
How to approach website linking
Create website links in your website to other relevant sites. Do it for the legitimate purpose of helping your visitors in their quest for useful content.
Obtain links from other sites to bring interested visitors naturally to your website. Mutual interest will create opportunities to exchange links with other websites operating in your field or in complementary fields.
It's a slow process, generally requiring a personal letter to each webmaster. Be complementary about his website. First create the link in your website to his website, before you write to him. It works better, he can see you mean business! In your letter, suggest a key phrase which he could use to link to your site.
You want to exchange links with websites that are as well-known and popular as possible. Bear in mind, they are trying to do the same. (To help you find relevant websites, you could use a backlink suggester tool, or try a search using some of your own key phrases.)
This is an entirely natural and legitimate way of acquiring website links. It will not result in sanctions being applied to your website by search engines.
If you feel uncomfortable about exchanging links with another website that you regard as a competitor in your field, then don't do it. (They may be just as reluctant to link to you.)
Website Links - What to avoid
Avoid swapping links with websites that have a link page with hundreds, or even thousands, of unrelated links - and little else (link farms). No one uses these link farms to find anything, because they are just a random collection of websites (unlike a directory). Search Engines give you no credit for these links , and may actually penalise you.
Avoid all website linking schemes, whether you have to pay for them or not. Avoid them even though they assure you that they are adored by Google and have helped thousands of websites to improve their ranking, or that Google will never catch on to what they are doing.
It's best to avoid any product or service which promises to create large numbers of website links in a short period of time, no matter how plausible their story.
There's another kind of website link we need to discuss, which brings us to our next tutorial on Web Directories...
Links / Resources
Backlink Suggester Tools:
Webconfs: Backlink Builder
More articles on Website Links:
Stephen Bucaro: The link swapping trap.
Smart-IT-Consulting: Automated Link Swaps
Smart-IT-Consulting: The Value of Links from S.E. perspective
Bulid Traffic: Website Links Top Prev Next: Web Directories
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High quality website links bring visitors to your site