Link Exchange Writer: Rich B

Although search engine algorithms are top-secret, pretty much everyone knows that having links (both inbound and to some extent outbound) improves your ranking

Although search engine algorithms are top-secret, pretty much everyone knows that having links (both inbound and to some extent outbound) improves your ranking. To some extent, this is covered in the Search Engine Optimization articles, but it's very important.

The first thing to know is to steer clear of bad sources of links. Avoid them like the plague. Seriously, links from low quality sites not only don't help your ranking, but may actually hurt it. By low-quality sites, I don't just mean boring / useless / unpopular websites, these just don't do much good. I mean link farms (these are sites that have very little content and just a collection of links). If you've been lucky enough not to run into one of these sites yet, you're definitely not missing much. Don't bother linking to these sites, their links pages are buried, have no Page Rank (the Google measure of how effective a link is) and are crammed with dozens of equally bad pages. Don't go there. This also goes for both the free and paid submission services that make offers like get listed on a million sites in 15 minutes. If you want to try this strategy, well, knock yourself out, but don't say I didn't warn you.

The secret to link success is to find good relevant websites and exchange links with them, that's it. It sounds dumb to put it like that, but that is really all there is to it.

We're looking for websites that have a good reputation. Links from good websites carry far more weight than links from bad ones. Google Page Rank (almost always abbreviated to PR by webmasters in the know) is a very good measure of this (although Page Rank is not very directly related to your ranking in the search results). You can check Google PR with tools like this one or most link management software does it for you.

Much more important than a site's PR is it's overall quality. Good websites to link with are, well, just plain good websites period. Websites that have plenty of content are good. A visitor friendly layout (not too much flash, no confusing javascript or frames or any of that rubbish) is good for visitors and search engine robots. Basically, you want to link with the kind of place that you would be happy visiting getting visitors from and sending visitors to. Links pages should be easy to find from the site's front page, well organized, and relevant (without being a massive directory).