What is a good link strategy?
The simplest link strategy is one where you only exchange links (known as reciprocal links) with webmasters of similarly themed websites.
The most effective link strategies involve:
- Using links that are constructed using titles and descriptions containing keyword phrases that match those used on the target webpage.
- Only exchanging links with websites that rank highly in search engines.
- Using a system which makes the pages of reciprocal links easy to search.
How effective is a good link strategy?
Using a good link strategy is the single, but the most important, thing you can do to increase website traffic.
There are two major reasons to to use a proper link strategy:
- Exchanging links can boost your rankings in search engines because the number of links back to your site is factored into the ranking algorithms especially with search engines such as Google.com.
- But the most important benefit is the traffic resulting directly from these links.
One study conducted by WebSideStory's StatMarket Website Optimization Service showed that 21% of site visitors get there via links and only 13% from search engine traffic.
That's nearly 40% more traffic from links than from search engines. Websites that are not very well search engine optimized will get a higher percentage of their traffic from links.
But...
Websites that trade links solely for search engine rankings, have random collections of links to hundreds of sites with almost every imaginable theme.
These links pages are never going to be visited by people looking for additional information.
On the other hand...
Websites that have their links categorized are more user friendly, more credible, more helpful, and more likely to attract visitors to their link partner's websites.
How do you put together an effective link strategy?
Your goal is to put together a link directory which visitors to your website will appreciate and to which they will come back time after time when ever they are searching for information.
In order to make this happen, you need a strategy. A process for collecting and categorizing links that you will not deviate from.
When putting together a link strategy, there are two golden rules:
- Make sure all your links are themed. You only want to collect links from websites that have content that is related to yours.
- Make sure all your links are easy to find. For a link directory to be of any use, it must be logically categorized.
Glen Canady gives an in depth explanation of how to do this in his excellent ebook "Gorilla Web Site Marketing". He also explains how to automate the task of finding, collecting and categorizing potential link partners.
And there's a valuable bonus, people who purchase his ebook get a substantial discount on the software used in the automated process.
You can get away without using the automated process, but be forewarned - collecting and categorizing links is a long, involved and tedious task and if you have more than one website, you will struggle to do this manually.
If the manual route is the way you want to go, here's a few tips to help get you started:
- To get an idea of what a categorized link directory looks like, have a look at the links directory on this website. You can find it on the menu on the left or click here.
- Set up your links directory so that it is in a folder named "links" and name your main directory page "index.html" - the reason for this is that some search engines will penalize you if you have any webpages with names ending in ...links.html, or ...links.htm, or ...links.shtml.
- Use the search engines to find link directories with the same theme as your website and then:
- Look at their categories for some ideas of your own.
- Save the pages of the categories you want to include in your own directory so you can get the necessary link and contact details when you are ready to include them in your own directory.
- Make sure your link directory is easy to find. If people don't recognize the link to it immediately, they will never use it.
- Try to link only with websites that have categorized links. You won't get many visitors from websites that have over thirty links on a page.
Websites that have hundreds of links and split them into pages of fifty links are worse - you won't get any traffic from them, but they will get traffic from you. Not a very reciprocal arrangement is it?
The only time linking to one of these websites makes sense is if they have a very high Google Page Rank. A link from them will help with your own Google Page Rank.
- Download the Google toolbar so you can identify webpages with a high Google Page Rank.
- Try to link with websites that have a Google PR (Page Rank) or 4 or higher.
- When you request a reciprocal link from a website, make sure you have put their link up first.
- Try to use a system which highlights the links from reciprocal link partners from the links you have put up but for which there is no reciprocal arrangement yet.
- When you email a webmaster to ask for a reciprocal link, tell them where they can find the link to their website and include all the necessary information to use for the link back to your website.
- Use the same keywords for your link title as you have used in the title and heading of your webpage.
For example - the primary keyword phrase for this website is "increase website traffic" and the reciprocal link details included in every reciprocal link request are:
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You can use the following information for linking to us:
Title: How to increase website traffic
URL: http://www.colevans.com/index.shtml
Description: How to substantially increase traffic to your website - the secrets are revealed in this definitive guide.
If you want, you can copy and paste the following HTML source code:
<a href="http://www.colevans.com/index.shtml" target="_blank"><b>How to increase website traffic</b></a><br>How to substantially increase traffic to your website - the secrets are revealed in this definitive guide.<br>
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The link looks like this:
How to increase website traffic
How to substantially increase traffic to your website - the secrets are revealed in this definitive guide.
- Develop a system for regularly checking that all of the reciprocal links to your site still exist.
A lot of webmasters will put your link up for a short while and remove it. This means that they have more incoming than outgoing links and so earn a higher page rank.
Your website will have more outgoing than incoming links and so will loose page rank.
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