Power Linking Strategies and Website Promotion Secrets
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More and more folks are realizing that building a solid themed reciprocal link directory is an affordable and highly effective way to increase inbound traffic. Not only is traffic generated through direct external links, but weight is also given to search engines, as they assume that your website is more relevant. Relevant link building is clearly the key, where spammers requesting any link they can get will lose out every time. The more experienced you get in website promotion, the more you will want to concentrate on quality links. Let's look at one or two good rules to adhere to.
You will see a marked improvement in the quality of your traffic, not to mention a surge in search engine rankings, when you spend time weeding out the wheat from the chaff. Ask yourself, "Who is my audience and where would they hang out?" Once you have targeted your audience, you will start to build a themed link directory. Make a point of only trading links with a website that:
Shares an Interested Audience
This is extremely important. If your website is about fly fishing in Montana, then linking to a site that sells Viagra is not going to do you any good. Just as importantly, when you do get offered a link from a site that shares your audience, make sure they are not linking to those Viagra sites!
Has a Clearly Visible Text Link to its Link Directory
I can't tell you how many times I get proposed a link trade with a site that has told me they have already placed a link on their links page. 50% of the time they have not placed a link and secondly there is no clearly visible link to their links page from their home page. What good is that to anyone? I can't get traffic from their site and Google won't index either, as it can't spider the page.
Has a Links Page With No More Than 50 to 60 Links Displayed
Many webmasters have no idea that search engines abhor link farms and will ban a page with an excessive amount of links. More importantly they may not know that their links page is presently percieved as a link farm. They have simply added too many links on one page. Keep a links page to a minimum of say 50 links per page along with a keyword-laden title and description and only link to others who follow this principle.
Has a Google PageRank Not Less Than Your Own
This is a good rule of thumb. Clearly, we would all love to trade links with a 9/10 site. It simply ain't gonna happen if you are still at 1/10. Take a few baby steps and climb up the ladder; once in a while you might get a good 5 or 6 during the early stages. Just make sure you don't link to zeros, especially if their page is chock full of links. It may have been banned anyway.
Has a Static HTML Links Page
Google doesn't rank pages particularly well that move around so try to stay away from these! Be cautious of .asp or .php scripts even though they may appear to be static. My rule of thumb is I will only link to .html pages if the pagerank is worth it.
Link Trading 
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