Linking is a powerful way to promote your business, bringing you a steady stream of targeted visitors. It will snowball over time and raise your rank in Google and the other search engines, and it does not cost you a penny. As with all promotions it needs to be done right or it can work against you.
Done right linking can be an easy and effortless way to bring a steady and increasingly large stream of targeted visitors to your site. Done wrong and you will experience a drop in search engine rank and a definite decrease in traffic. Here are some points to help you succeed.

Do:
Find related websites with reasonable amounts of traffic
Make sure you exchange inbound links
Be sure to check out your future link partner's site before exchanging links. Ensure that it is of good quality and will be valuable to your visitors
Text links are better than graphic links.
Have your own domain. Never use a free domain.

1. Link to non-relevant sites, you can be penalized by the search engines especially Google if you do this.

1. Link to competitors. You obviously do not want to loose potential customers to them.

1. Link to and with Link Farms. These are websites that have large numbers of links from anywhere and everywhere, all jumbled together. Your link will

   never be found by anybody and your visitors will not benefit from visiting these websites. The search engines will also penalize you.

How:

1. Look up the top 10-20 websites in the major search engines especially google

1. Visit their website

1. Write a respectful proposal letter to exchange links, referencing something of interest on their site. Tell them a little about your site and why it would be beneficial to their business to link to you. Show them the URL

   that has their link and ask them to exchange links with you.

1. When linking have a couple of lines about your business included with your link. This will attract visitors to click on your link.

1. Exchange links, and check on your link partners to see that they keep your link on their site.

Making link-building reports is important, as they will make you aware about your link popularity for different search engines. Always check your link popularity with the top search engines. By getting link popularity reports made, you will also see the total number of links you have to your site. And will make you aware of all the types of links you are connected to. Your own software can make reports or you can hire a third party service to do this.
Many times your link is added to some other websites without your permission you need to be careful of this as these sites may not be relevant or of good quality and can be detrimental to your business. You can check all information about every website linking to you with the help of link popularity reports software. The software confirms the number and domain names of the websites linking to your site, allowing you to check them out.
Web rings: A web ring is a group of sites which have the same content and subject matter. These sites are linked together to form a navigational ring.
The concept behind web rings is that visitors can navigate from one site to another for more information on identical subjects. This makes the task easier for a visitor who is trying to gather information regarding a specific subject and adds more value to your site. Web rings will contain a lot of links on similar topics.

If you want to create your link on one of the web rings, you would have to go through a simple registration process. To register you will:

• Submit your URL, your name, your website description and your email address.

• Then choose a web ring login name and a password.
• After confirming all these things, you can submit them to the main web ring site.

Creating a link on the web rings can be useful to you. After you have registered with the web rings, you will get free publicity for your website. This means that your link would be available to all the visitors looking for the content on a particular topic, you have on your website. Web rings provide an excellent source of traffic to your website. The popularity of your website increases as more and more visitors click on your link, searching for information on a specific topic.

Always categorize your links into related topics to your business. Keep 10 links maximum on one page so that links are easy to see and locate.

Linking takes a little time initially to start but once you do, traffic will start to snowball Your business will build up and over time sales will come. As your quality links increase so will your google page rank and you will improve your position in the search engines significantly. Continues to build your links on a weekly basis and you will reap the benefits.

Author: Constantin Chersin
I was born in September 20, 1955 in Romania, and I am a Romanian citizen. Married, 2 beautiful daughters 18 and 20 years.
I graduated Faculty of Automatics in 1983 becoming a System Engineer, with a full degree. I worked in Ultra Sonic and High Frequency Power Supply Converter research institute in Bucharest, Romania until 1990.
After the fall of Ceausescu's regime, I have worked in sales since 1994. I now run my own company FOX I.E. in Romania. Starting in 1997 my company has dedicated its whole efforts to internet software activity.
In 2003 I founded my own US based corporation IT PRO VISION, Inc. Both companies have their own websites at

FOX SOFTWARE and IT PRO VISION, Inc.
More articles can be found at http://marketing.itprovision.net.