Welcome to part three of our series of articles on search engine optimization. In
third and final part of our series of articles on search engine optimization we cover
topic of links,
types of links and what makes them so important.Links
Links, links, links. Everybody wants people to link to their websites. Why? The truth is that high quality links to your website are important as regards search engine popularity. The question everbody asks though is "... yeah that's great but how do I get people to link to my site?"
Well firstly there are three different types of links:
Reciprocal
A reciprocal link is when you find a site that you want to get a link from. You place a link to this website on your resources page. You then email
webmaster of
other site and ask for a link in return. The webmaster can then either accept or decline your request.
This is a very hit-and-miss process. If you make 100 reciprocal link requests you may only get 5 links. It's also very time consuming but can be worthwhile if you get a few strong links from it. These links can "lead"
search engines directly to your site and get you indexed faster.
One note is to never name your links page "links". Call it resources. Call it related sites but never call
page "links". Some search engines frown on this. Also try to avoid
automated reciprocal linking software packages - personally I delete any request received from users of these packages without even reading it. Most other website owners will too.
Non-Reciprocal
A non-reciprocal link is where you ask another website to link to yours but you don't offer to link to them in return. Unless you have a truly massive and popular website this is not a request you can make very often . Don't expect website owners to fall over themselves offering free links to your brand new site. Very few people can ask for a non-reciprocal link and make it happen. One possible way of getting this type of link is to offer some kind of freebie in return. A free ebook or some other incentive might just work.