If you are a website owner or administrator, chances are you have received an email like this requesting the placement of links on your site:

“Dear Webmaster

As a part of an ongoing campaign to increase the Link Popularity of our website, I am looking for some good potential sites like yours. I reviewed your site and found that, in SEO perspective your site is Perfect. Also, this would be a great resource for my visitors too. I would request you to consider listing under your “exchange links” Section…”

Many times it is clear they have not visited your site, and the site that they are suggesting has no relevance to your site, or to your site visitors. It is just an attempt to increase their presence in search engines.

Links work best when they:

1. are really useful to your site visitors, compliment your service or product offering, and don’t send visitors off your site never to be seen by you again, i.e to sites that are competing for the same audience as you;
2. are from reputable sites that hold some weight with search engines;
3. use relevant keywords in the actual link text, rather than just “click here”

If it does not add any value to your own site’s function and usability, then in my view I wouldn’t bother building a dedicated ‘links’ page.

However links can be used effectively if you have a blog, such as the Hot PJ blog. You can write a post with a link to a useful resource, such as a free website review tool, explaining why it is useful and relevant along with your own comments and opinion. This can draw traffic to your blog, and ultimately your site, by being known as a place to go for the latest commentary and links to good quality resources.

Posted on October 15th, 2009 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing