How and Why to Build a Linking Strategy for your Web Site

by Michael Rock

Why would you want a linking strategy for your site? The most important reason is to drive traffic to your site, which in turn would increase visitors that would either purchase from you, make your web site more popular, or reach a larger audience to inform for your cause. The second reason to develop a linking strategy for your site is to help increase your rankings in the search engine. With Google this is very important for achieving high web rankings, and I expect the other search engines to follow suit relatively soon.

There are many ways to develop a linking strategy where the links to your site will multiply without any effort from you. This is the most effective way to generate links to point to your site. In this article we will discuss how to do this, debunk myths, and how to do this without unintentionally harming your site's status.

Debunking myths:

Linking software

I personally don't approve of linking software that does the work for you. Why? Because the software does not do a good enough job where it can tell if the site it has the same theme or relative content that matches your site. Many errors slip through the process when this is done, that can cause damage to the reputation and rankings in the search engine. Also each site that you would like to link to you should have a decent PR ranking from Google to help your site's rankings. (PR ranking is a method that Google uses to put a value on the web site) If you have too many web sites pointing to you with a poor PR ranking it could actually make your site drop in the rankings. And in addition sites with excellent PR rankings would help your rankings a great deal.

Linking farms and automated link exchanges

Linking farms and automated link exchanges are not recommended for the same reasons as the linking software. Poor quality links and potentially harmful to your site. In addition these two methods carry another danger. If the site that links to has been put onto a black list for spam, and your site points to that site your web site will automatically get black listed and your rankings will go down as well. That is why I prefer one way links to your site instead of reciprocal links. It may sound hard to do, but it isn't and I will show you a way to do it below.

The more sites pointing to your site the better. Right?

Wrong! In the past search engines would rank you higher in the search engines by judging the value of your site to the number of links pointing to it. But because people have abused and try to cheat this system, the rules have changed. Now they actually penalize you for too many sites pointing to yours if they are deemed suspicious. For instance many other sites pointing to you with the same IP address (caused by you putting up mirror sites to build links), links that point to that do not have the same content as you ("once I saw a web design site having a reciprocal link with a lingerie site"), and links that have low PR rankings pointing to your site (in this case the more the merrier does not work).