Linking strategies
You have spent the time and money getting your site tuned up
from the SEO perspective. Your keywords have been well thought
out, your text and tags reflect those keywords, and you are
actively adding content to your site on a regular basis.
Congratulations - you have made a great start, but there is one
more area that requires your attention. It is called back-links.
What these are are other web sites or web resources that link to
you. The closest analogy I can come up with in the real world is
networking.
When a search engine looks at your site, it tries to figure out
how "important" your site is, and one of the ways it does this
is by checking to see how many sites point to yours. The more
links there are, the higher your site ranking.
Well almost....
Over the last few years, SEO pro's have been exploiting this and
there are many sites that have pages and pages that contain
nothing but links for the purpose of establishing what is called
reciprocal linking (I'll link to you, if you will link to me)
I've seen sites with literally thousands of these links, and
quite simply, it doesn't work anymore. The people that program
the search engines have noticed this phenominon, and have
changed their ranking procedure to check for this to the point
that if you get involved in this sort of activity, you may well
find your ranking dropping, not improving.
So what sort of links are good?
Well - honest ones is the short answer. Web sites that regard
you as a business partner, rather than a link enhancer will have
your link on pages without thousands of others - those sorts of
links will have a positive effect. Another source of links is
from professional articles and the like. If you publish articles
in any of the on-line resources and they contain a byeline
linking to your web site, those will be positive.
The list of potential links is endless, it just takes time and
creativity to come up with good targets. It also takes time to
cultivate those relationships.
In other words - there isn't any difference between networking
in the real world and in cyberspace.
Best of luck coming up with a great networking strategy