Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2010, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

For more than a decade we and, for that matter, Google itself have been saying that you should establish links based on their potential for generating traffic and sales for you and their ability to provide added-value content to your end users.

Nothing about that has changed. In fact, given the substantial cost and meager results typical of most pay-for-play site marketing dreams and schemes, taking full advantage of reciprocal linking's unique ability to make your site "discoverable" by an unlimited number of people who would otherwise never see it is more important now than ever.

But none of that means you should ignore link exchange's powerful potential to positively impact your search engine rank. Since the best links for delivering customers to your shopping cart are frequently the same ones that will add "brownie points" to your search engine profile, it's common sense to take a site's search engine potential into consideration when evaluating a potential link partner.

Though we're presenting five tips for doing just that, the reality is that you'll probably never need to use all of them except in extreme cases where you're trying to select one or two links to add from among eight or ten contenders.

1. Look for Common Keywords

Everyone knows that all the major search engines -- not just Google -- reject irrelevant, unrelated, plucked out of thin air or automatically harvested links. Some of the least technology enabled engines mostly ignore such links altogether; other engines -- the ones with more sophisticated algorithms, particularly Google -- sometimes punish sites with non-relevant links by lowering their rankings.

What not everyone knows is that "relevance" is an elastic term in the search bot lexicon. Yes, the bots do read every word of the pages accessible to them and can tell whether one page or site is woefully unrelated to another. But that's a long way from being able to determine how closely related two sites are. To accomplish that based solely on visible content would require advanced, almost forensic, analysis of sentences and phrases. And that, at this point in time, the bots don't (and probably can't) do.

Common keywords, however, do offer a method of determining "relative relevancy" that is subject to the kind of plus and minus mathematical analysis search bots do best.

Any time you're considering choosing from a number of link partners with essentially the same content use the "source" view on your browser to uncover their keywords. In most cases, you'll probably want to link to the ones which have the most words and phrases that match your own.

Note: This assumes that the keywords are properly seeded in the site's text. Sites with "orphan" keywords unrelated to their visible content are generally bad -- or possibly even "black hat" -- and should be avoided under any circumstances.

2. Check Your Potential Partners' Incoming Links

The more you know about anything -- including potential link partners -- the easier making a correct decision about that subject will be.

There are a fistful of online site explorers that let you enter any site's URL and obtain all kinds of information and statistics about that site. Most of them are free, though some charge for access to "advanced" features -- most of which you'll neither need nor want.

Of these "explorers," the most well known, the one you're most likely to have heard of, is Yahoo! Site Explorer. However, since we don't want to waste your time telling you things you already know, we'll use the newest and most link-centric of these analytical tools -- SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer (OSE) -- in our example. (Note: To check an unlimited number of sites on OSE you have to register, but it's free and very unobtrusive.)

Looking at the Open Site Explorer home page you'll see a big text entry box for the URL of the site you want to check. Under it is an incredibly useful button that allows you to enter a second URL to compare two sites head to head.

Clicking "get link data" will present you with four infobits at the top of the page. Of these, three are almost totally unimportant for our purposes. Page Authority and Domain Authority because they are derived from SEOmoz's algorithms and not the search engines' and Total Links because we're analyzing this site for its SEO potential as a link partner and search engines don't crawl pages with no-follow tags. Knowing the number of Linking Root Domains, however, is very useful when comparing sites. Having links from a multitude of domains indicates greater and more diverse "support" for the linked site.

Moving down the page a bit, select Linking Pages: Show Followed + 301; Links From: External Pages Only; and To: This Page (you could select All Pages In This Domain, but that much granularity is hardly needed here.)

Quickly scan down the first page or two of returns to check that most of the linked sites seem relevant. Since there is no way for anyone to control who links to their site, there will always be some irrelevant ones, but that's not a problem to the search engines unless you link back to that irrelevant site.

Lastly, click the Full List of Link Metrics button and scroll down to the total number of followed links. If one site has significantly more of these than another, it will -- for SEO purposes -- probably be a better match.

3. Check (as best you can) The Site's Google Return Position

Everything else being equal, a site that returns well for one or more of your crucial keywords will probably be a better SEO partner than one that returns poorly.

Unfortunately, finding a site's return position with ease and precision is virtually impossible because the scores of applications touted to perform that task are generally not worth the price (usually free) of admission. In fairness, this is not entirely the application developers' fault. Because they are dependent on automated queries to work, Google considers them spam and does everything it can to blow them up by returning either no results or wildly inaccurate ones.

One thing you can do to make life in this regard a little easier is to go to Google Preferences and change the default Number of Results setting from 10 to 100. Enter your keyword, check the first two return pages and if you find the site you're considering there grab it as a link partner before someone else does.

With tens of thousands or more sites returning for the vast majority of keywords, being in the top 200 is good.

4. Does the Potential Partner Site Offer Deep Links To Their Content?

If so, that's a plus because a lot of anecdotal evidence indicates that the engines place extra emphasis on those types of links. LinksManager by the way has full support for Deep Linking.

5. Does Your Potential Link Partner's Site "Present Well?"

It sounds almost absurd, but the phrase "you are what you eat" applies to linking just as much as it does to so many elements of life. In a very real sense, you are who link to. Links to a substantial number of exceptional sites can make your good-but-not-quite-great site appear a little better to both end users and search engines. Link to bad sites and that old villain "guilt by association" rears its ugly head and makes you look worse.

Search engine bots may not yet be able to identify illogical statements, brilliant insights or perfectly positioned commas, but they sure can sniff out whether a site has a bunch of misspelled words. And they can recognize the difference between what the Google Guidelines call a "useful, information-rich site" and one with two or three pages of garbage directory links on it.

Limit your linking only to sites that are literate, well nourished with content, and properly constructed in such areas as internal navigation links, and the search bots will love you for it.

So there they are. Five ways to screen potential link partner sites for search-engine curb appeal. But before you go overboard in using them please read the following disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing in the above article should be taken to mean that you should select all your link partners on the basis of whether or not they might help your SEO efforts. The primary goal of a linking campaign should be to build traffic and sales that are not dependent on the erratic whims of search engine robots. Frequently a small, unranked site with specialized content of interest to people in the market for your products or services will deliver more traffic and sales than a top one hundred site with less tightly focused content. Likewise, new sites don't usually provide as much search engine "bounce" as sites a year or more old, but may deliver a significant amount of hits to their link partners.

In other words, some links will deliver customers, some will improve search engine rankings, others -- bless 'em -- will do both. For maximum benefit, the best policy is to get high quality relevant links slow and steady over a long period of time.