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How To Make Your Link Exchange Campaign
Work For The Success Of Your Web Site

By Dawn Rowlett
Search Engine Positioning Specialist

These Techniques Really Work
We Use Them Ourselves!

In my quest for personally gaining high quality links to 71 web sites, I have found that there is a vast amount of incorrect information out there and numerous mis-informed webmasters.  What many don't realize is that by being misinformed, you could actually be hurting your own web site when you could easily be helping it to become more popular through productive link strategies.  With experience and knowledge, anyone can can learn how to make a link campaign work for a web site by increasing sales minded visitors, publicity, your Google PageRank™ score and your overall search engine visibility.

Make Your Web Site Worth Linking To:

Your campaign will be much more successful if people with high quality web sites look at your site and actually want to link to it by knowing that it has quality marketing and search engine advertising potential.  If they feel that their site is more professional than yours, has more traffic than yours, has a higher Google PageRank™ than your site and has an overall higher visibility than yours, chances are, they are not going to be willing to link to your web site.  Make sure that this doesn't happen to you by evaluating your web site and making sure of the following:

• Do not use spam techniques.

• Do not use framed sites.

• Do not "capture" outgoing links within a frame of your own site.

• Do not link to other sites using a Java Script code.

• The site should have it's own domain name. 

• The site should not be hosted on a free server.

• The site should have a professional, quality image.

• Keep your site clean, neat and organized.

• The site should not have excessive pop-ups.

• The site should contain GOOD information and / or products.

• For the most part, all of your important pages should be heavily cross linked within your web site.  In some way or another, every page should link to and from every page.  There should not be any pages on your site that are more than two clicks away from your home page.  Try to keep all of your pages only one click away from your home page if at all possible.

Categorize Your Links:

Don't just throw your outgoing links up on a page in no specific order.  There should be at least one category for every topic relating to the general topic of specific sites. 

Develop A Directory:

If your web site contains more than 25 outgoing links, develop a "categorized directory" of link pages within the site. 

Make sure that all of these pages are cross linked together.  This will help others easily find all of the categories and it makes it much easier for a search engine spider to crawl through all of the pages -- giving your pages more importance in a search engine therefore, increasing PageRank, rankings and traffic.

A well designed directory will not only help you keep your links organized, it will also give your site an added boost in marketing and search engine potential. 

You are now providing additional pages to your web site, offering new ways for visitors to enter your site, new reasons for visitors to be at your site and a cause for them to return.  Not to mention that a majority of major search engines love to see large sites in top ranking positions!

Limit Your Outgoing Links:

A page should not contain more than 25 outgoing links at any time for any reason.  More than 25 links means:

• More than likely, no one is ever going to take the time to scroll through a ton of links to find something they might be interested in.

• A search engine spider is going to view the page and the links as being less important than they could be.

Be Selective:

Don't accept links from just anyone.  Just as you are learning how to make your web site acceptable for linking, follow the same guidelines when accepting outgoing links to place on your web site.

Quality Counts!

This is where being selective is very important.  Just one link coming to your web site from a quality web site is better than 100 links from a web site that has little or no marketing or search engine visibility and lacks the potential to be successful.

Should Google PageRank™ Be Considered?

This question does not have a simple yes or no answer and can seem tricky and confusing. 

If your already unsure of exactly how the Google PageRank™ system works, it may be helpful to read our article on An Explanation of The Google PageRank Technology For Newbie's, before you continue through this section.

For those of us that are familiar with how the Google PageRank™ system works, we know that receiving links from PageRank 5 pages and higher will be the most beneficial to us.
Receiving links from sites with a PageRank 6 and above will help us substantially.  But what about those sites with a PR less than 5?  This is where it gets tricky.  This is where I have even seen other search engine positioning specialists get confused.

It is very important that you do not judge a web sites quality or potential based solely on the fact that it does not have a Google PageRank at all or has a PR0. 

Having no PageRank at all, probably just means that Google is not yet aware that the site exists -- but they soon will. 

A PR0 probably means that the site or page is new and Google knows that the site exists and has indexed the site in their database but has not yet had a chance to completely evaluate the site.  During these circumstances, it is very important to use your best judgment.  Does the site meet the guidelines that we previously told you that you should use to make people want to link to you?  Do you see potential in the site, information and products?  If so, don't judge the site based on PR.  Link to them if you feel that it will benefit you in the long run.

Contrary to popular belief, as long as the site is a quality site worth linking to, linking to a site with a PR0 will NOT harm your web site!  In fact, linking to the site from a higher PageRank page of your own site, will increase that sites PR, which in turn, will boost your own PR.

Now, what about PR 1, 2, 3 & 4?

Most of the time a page with a PR 1 or 2 probably has very little traffic and has been viewed as having little importance by most major search engines.  It is possible that the site or page has even been penalized for using poor marketing techniques. 

Then again, a PageRank 1 or 2 might only mean that the search engines have a hard time crawling the page or accessing it.  Many very popular, high traffic web site pages have a low PR, yet have the potential to send numerous visitors to your web site through their substantial visitors. In cases such as this, the home page should at least have a nice PageRank in place as well as other pages throughout the site. 

In any case, more than likely, a page with this low of a PageRank will not overcome the low PR in the future unless substantial changes are made.  You must make an decision.  Do you feel that the page is popular enough to offer you equal or greater benefits to you if you exchange links with this site?

A site with a PR 3 or 4 could quite possibly become a 5, 6 or 7 in the near or very far off future as the site grows and becomes more popular through visitors, search engines and incoming links.  It isn't going to hurt you to link to these sites.  It might help you just a tiny bit, as long as the site meets quality guidelines.  A link from your higher PR page might help boost the PR of the site, in turn, boosting the PR of your site in the long run.

Include Content On Your Link Pages:

Visitors like information.  Search engine spiders thrive on information.  Instead of placing link after link after link on your link pages, spice them up a bit!  Offer quality, useful information about the category topic.

Optimize Your Directory & Links For High Rankings:

If every page of your directory is optimized for high rankings for popular terms related to each category, you will save yourself numerous hours of going out to look for sites to link to you -- because they will come to you!  If your categorized pages are listed high in search engine rankings under popular terms that web sites want to be found under, they will want to be listed on your high ranking page!

This step might be a little more difficult for those who don't have SEO knowledge and experience behind them.    If you are responsible for maintaining a web site, it really is important that you do at least have a general knowledge of some important SEO strategies because something your doing in the site could be harming the sites potential and you don't even know it.  Take some time to do some research on the subject.  An excellent place to start is in our very own Search Engine Optimization Strategy section of this web site.

Related Articles:

• New Linking Strategy - Making The Web A Better Place To Be

• An Explanation of The Google PageRank Technology For Newbie's

• Increase Web Site Visibility

Completely Confused? Don't Have Time For All Of This?

We can help!  If you have the time and understanding to learn the process yourself or simply don't have the budget to pay for services, we do encourage you to learn and implement the link building and search engine marketing process yourself.  However if you simply don't have the time and you do have a marketing budget available, we do offer all of the experience and services that you need to to make your web site a marketing success!

Contact Us At
904-992-4341
For More Information On Our Services

Over the course of the last 12 months alone, we have managed link campaigns and search engine optimization for over 100 web sites.  Our search engine marketing success has been proven time after time, ranking as many as 55 keyword phrases for a single web site in top positions in major search engines.  Many of our link campaigns include securing anywhere from 50-500 new incoming links to a web site.  Because of this experience, we think it's fair to say that we consider ourselves to be advanced experts in our field.

Directories That We Have Developed:

This article, entitled "How To Make Your Link Exchange Campaign
Work For The Success Of Your Web Site" was written by Dawn Rowlett of Web Submission Services to inform web site owners of the importance of successful linking. Please visit Web Submission Services Search Engine Marketing service and information center for more information on the proper steps to take when preparing your web site for Search Engine Advertising with ethical search engine optimization practices.

A NOTE TO WEBMASTERS:
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This article is intended to inform web site owners of the importance of avoiding spam techniques and how to recognize them when preparing for a successful search engine marketing campaign.  Special permissions may be granted to use the content of this page in it's entirety for a variety of intentions.  If you would like re-print rights on this article, you MUST send Dawn Rowlett an e-mail requesting special permission.   You MUST include your web site URL.