2. Getting in-bound links to your site is one of the most
important things you can do for generating traffic to
your site:
3. * It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.
4. * It helps to boost your position in the search engine.
5. * It helps to build small streams of traffic to your site.
6. Links to your site are normally given by also giving a link
from your site to the other one. These are called
reciprocal links or link swaps. And naturally there are a
few services available to automate the link somehow.
7. Some of these services will automatically add the link to
your site and the other site once your link request is
approved (through some software to be installed on
your site).
8. Some will simply point you to sites which do use link
swaps and who are interested in hearing from you.
9. Some will also check that the link to your site remains in
place, and email you if it disappears. It's then up to you
to either contact the owner of that site to find out why
the link has vanished, or to remove the reciprocal link on
your site.
10. But there is one thing they do not do, and which you
need to watch for:
11. How would a visitor to the other site FIND the link back
to your site?
12. Because you can be sure that if a human visitor cannot
find it, then it's unlikely that a search engine will.
13. Let me give you an example: Andrew was using the
service at LinkMetro.com to get links to one of his sites.
Someone had a site on a related topic, and they
requested a link back to Andrew's. He checked the link
back to his site, and everything looked OK. The other
site had requested a link back to their homepage (rather
than another specific page), so Andrew checked out that
home page.
18. It seemed that the link directory on that other site was
not linked from the home page of that site.
19. The other site was requesting inbound links back to its
home page, but effectively hiding the return link from
the search engines and from website visitors. And that
makes the link back to Andrew's site useless - it's like
that link doesn't even exist.
20. So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, check
the route that people and search engines would use to
get from that site over to yours. You might be surprised
what you find.
