Link popularity is critical, especially with Google. The more keyword-rich incoming links you have to your site from high quality, well-established sites, the better. There are specific ways of going about this process, but can be hugely laborious and time-consuming and is actually best handled by yourself as you know your friends who have websites and you can therefore negotiate the trading of links with them ("if you link to my site I will link to yours"). However, it is important that you understand how to ensure that the traded links work well and the following advice will help you avoid common mistakes.

The Google toolbar helps you assess which sites you should try to obtain in­ coming links from, and which to avoid! It displays a score for every web page you visit known as "page rank", which is a measure of how significantly Google regards that page. The higher the number the better, and do NOT try to obtain links from sites where the page rank bar is greyed out!

When Google introduced link popularity and page rank, link farming sprung up to abuse the system and artificially inflate page rankings for sites. This kind of "factory farming" of links is now regarded as link-spamming, and Google is improving its algorithm to only give weight to CONTENT / CONTEXT - RELEVANT links. In other words, a simple list of links on a special links page is unlikely to be very helpful. Each link must be CONTEXTUAL and have CONTENT.

Thus, the link should at least occur within a paragraph (or even better, a page) related to the topic relevant to the link.

You must also pay close attention to how the incoming links to your pages are structured. The link text must contain relevant keywords, and you should also use link titles in the HTML code. Suppose you are selling herbs grown in Scotland. Here is a sample piece link code which we give to prospective link partners for TOPS ©:

<p>Struggling to set up your new mail order business? Needing software to solve your order- processing problems? Save time with <a href = http://www.the-order-processing-solu­tion.co.uk/time-saving.shtml target="_blank" title = "save time with order processing"> TOPS - the time-saving order processing solution</a>, user-friendly software built from the user down, rather than the developer up.</p>

The above code displays as:

Struggling to set up your new mail order business? Needing software to solve your order- processing problems? Save time with TOPS - the time-saving order processing solution, user- friendly software built from the user down, rather than the developer up.

The link text is the actual piece of text the user clicks on; here it is "TOPS - the time-saving order processing solution". The link title would normally show by resting your mouse over the link and a little yellow box would appear with the words "save time with order processing".

Note the following:

1. The link is in a relevant sentence and paragraph
2. The link text "TOPS - the time-saving order processing solution" is keyword-rich.
3. The link title "save time with order processing" is keyword-rich.
4. The filename of the page to which the link is directed contains keywords (time-saving.shtml). Note the hyphens separating the words. This helps search engines to separate out the words. Search engines cannot always successfully separate out words in the way humans can.
5. The domain name (http://www.the-order-processing-solution.co.uk/) is also keyword-rich and hyphenated.

Note that you may not be able to do much about 4 and 5 if you already have a domain name and the pages being linked to have already been named and have already been indexed by search engines (renaming pages can easily cause you to lose what rankings you already have).

Here is a poor link:

<p>For information please <a href="http://www.theorderprocessingsolution.co.uk/page1.html" target="_blank" >click here</a></p>

The above code displays as:

For information please click here. (N.B. This is not a real link).

 

Note that in this case, the domain name to which the link is directed is non-hy­ phenated and thus might be meaningless to a search engine in terms of know­ing what the site is about, the page name does not tell the search engine spider anything meaningful (page1.html), there is no link title, and the link text is "click here". After all, you are not trying to sell "click heres" or attract users searching for "page 1's"!!

It is often forgotten, that it is not just incoming links that help your page, but also outgoing links to other reputable, high quality relevant websites, especially when these links occur in relevant places within your pages. It is much easier, of course, to provide outgoing links so this is a good place to start. Having "kindly" placed a good keyword- rich outgoing link to another site on a relevant page, you will also be in a good position to encourage the other organisation to kindly give you one in return - if they are reasonably altruistic!