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

Let's start here. Many more times than not people confronted with a decision follow the path of least resistance.

Everyone... even someone deciding whether to move in with a lover or hang on to their own apartment.

Everyone... even a person considering a job offer from a new company.

Everyone ... even a rabbit pondering whether to take flight or fight when confronting a fox (the path of least resistance tends to be pretty clear in such cases.)

Everyone ... even cows and city planners.

As author Robert Fritz explains in his best-seller "The Path of Least Resistance:"

People who come to my native Boston often ask me, "How did they ever design the layout of the roads?" There appears to be no recognizable city planning in Boston. T he Boston roads were actually formed by utilizing cow paths. The cow moving through the topography tended to move where it was immediately easiest to move. When a cow saw a hill ahead, she did not say to herself, "Aha! A hill! I must navigate around it." Rather she put one foot in front of another, taking whichever step was easiest at that moment, perhaps avoiding a rock or taking the smallest incline. In other words, what determined her behavior was the structure of the land.

Each time cows passed through the same area, it became easier for them to take the same path they had taken the last time, because the path became more and more clearly defined. Thus, the structure of the land gave rise to the cows' consistent pattern of behavior in moving from place to place. As a result, city planning in Boston gravitates around the mentality of the seventeenth-century cow.

In this lesson, we'll discuss five aspects of the "path of least resistance principle" and how they affect your linking campaign, website, and overall business.

1. The clearly defined path

According to author Fritz, who has trained tens of thousands of executives and entrepreneurs in 27 countries in business psychology, cows "browsing" the Massachusetts Bay Colony preferred traveling on a "clearly defined" path.

Today, 360 or so years later, most people surfing the web are just like those cows -- they prefer the road well traveled over that less traveled. They seek clearly defined routes. Offered a choice, they take the path of least resistance, rather than paths offering more resistance.

Which is why some of the most -- if not the absolute most -- important elements on your website are its navigational tools. Forget all that stuff about content being king. If you don't provide a path of least resistance -- a link, in other words -- to your content, the content itself becomes worthless. Many a piece of "kingly" content has been degraded to "joker" status because it isn't properly categorized or described in a navbar or reachable from internal links in related content.

This is particularly true of external links. Good links offer added value to your site visitors by, among other things, giving them additional information with which to make buying decisions. A full palette of useful links makes your site look more robust, more complete, more authoritative ... it inspires confidence in potential customers.

But not if they can't find them without having to go hunting. Make sure your links pages are always included in your navbar and labeled with such unambiguous words as "links," "resources," or "useful info." Also remember that search engine robots tend to follow paths of least resistance as well and are much more likely to spider and give you bonus points for highly visible links pages.

2. Use the path of "very least resistance" to generate backlinks

You walk out of the lodge and quickly notice how bitterly cold it is at high altitude. In front of you the mountain looms. To the left is a big sign with the words "TO SUMMIT" and three arrows. Under one arrow the text says "Trail A, paved , 2% maximum grade." The next arrow is "Trail B, unpaved, maximum grade, 4%." The third says "Trail C, rocky, sheer climb."

Of those options, A is clearly the path of least resistance. But there's also a path of very least resistance. You turn around, walk back into the lodge, and plop down in front of a nice warm fire.

When it comes to obtaining one-way links (i.e. back links), taking the path of very least resistance -- doing nothing, to put it in plain terms -- can be an enormously successful strategy.

Here's the ABC's of using this technique to generate relevant quality one way links.

a. Add a link solicitation to the bottom of your home page, on your links page(s) and, maybe, on your contact page. You can use the same text in each location, or, perhaps, a very few words -- such as, Want To Link? -- on your home page and something a bit more explanatory in the other locations.

Example: Have a website in the (insert your most important keyword) industry? We're looking for good, relevant links in the (next most important keyword), (third most important keyword) and all relevant industries. Click here to request a link.

b. Link the entire text fragment shown in the example above to your Suggest Link Form that has been created for you by LinksManager. You can get the URL from your Links Menu page or from without your LinksManager Dashboard. Contact the LinksManager Helpdesk if you need help finding the hyperlink to your Suggest Link Form.

c. Sit back, do nothing (i.e. take the path of very least resistance) and wait for the back links to start coming in.

Following their own path of least resistance, many webmasters will routinely add your link to their site when they fill out your Suggest Link Form. Since you're under no obligation to link to every site that requests a link from you, many of these links will remain as one-way back links to your site unless you convert them to two-way by posting a reciprocal link. Either way is absolutely "white hat" and ethical.

Tip: You can maximize the potential of this technique by creating link categories specific to the markets you're trying to attract links from. Other webmasters are more likely to link to your site if they see that you've already got a category that targets their potential customers. For example, if your site targets the wedding industry and you do not have a link category related to limousines, you are less likely to get relevant links from limo companies because they do not see a category where their link can live on your site. Make sure to create relevant categories that target your low hanging fruit.

3. Watching your words is important

The reason we're devoting a Linking School article to the path of least resistance is this: Links are paths. Paths between one site and another. And like all paths they can be easy or difficult to follow. More people will click on easy link "paths" than difficult ones.

What makes one link "easier" than another?

Since we've been talking about psychology, let's ask Big Daddy Sigmund himself.

"Words," Freud said, "have a magical power. Words sway an audience and dictate its decisions."

Website visitors are your audience. Your choice of title and anchor text words dictates whether members of that audience click on your link or someone else's.

Unless your domain name is ultra specific , it's generally best not to use it as a link title. Use two or three descriptive words instead. Example: If your URL is BuyTools.com, use that as your link title. If your URL is JoesSupply.com, use something like Best Tool Deals.

Anchor text should be equally specific. If you only sell power tools, "major brand power tools below cost" is better than "great prices on all kinds of tools." And if you're offering something significant that most competitors don't, be sure to include it in the anchor text, i.e. "top brand power tools below cost, free shipping."

4. "Path of least resistance" is not synonymous with "quick and dirty"

When making decisions regarding your site, remember to always look beyond tomorrow. Sometimes what seems to be a path of least resistance can actually be a primrose path leading to a sheer cliff.

Here's an example from our world. Visiting 50 websites to see if they might be good link partners is cheap (free, actually) and easy. But buying 50 links from a link farm and having them automatically posted to your website is, while not free, slightly easier. Does this, financial considerations aside, make growing your link presence by purchasing links the path of least resistance?

If you look only at the immediate present, the day you're looking to add links, it probably is. Weighing the consequences of buying those links, however, you find a different story. Because search engines consider automatically harvested links a quick and dirty linking scheme, taking that path will eventually lead to lower rankings; or even worse, sandboxing; or worst of all, de-indexing.

Regaining lost ranking is hard and time consuming enough, getting out of the sandbox or back in the index (when possible, which it sometimes isn't) is so difficult that people have jumped out of windows (or at least out of the e-commerce business) to avoid having to do it.

So what was the real path of least resistance to obtaining those 50 new links? The one began with only two lanes at the beginning but turned into a super highway by the end. Or the one that started with a resounding bang and ended with a deadly explosion?

Before choosing a path, think about where you're going and what you want to happen when you get there. Create a virtual Google Map in your mind and visualize the entire distance between Point A (needing links, in this example) and Point B (having links.) The real path of least resistance will be easy to spot.

5. "Path of least resistance" can be synonymous with "no brainer"

You don't have to be a direct lineal descendent of Freud to understand this basic psychological fact, "the less a person has to think about something, the more likely he is to do it."

Time for some self-analysis. Are you establishing, maintaining, checking and revising your links the hard way? If you are still manually managing your links, it's virtually certain that your linking strategy is not generating as much traffic as it could and should.

It's not delivering maximum positive search-engine optimization benefit.

It's not giving your end users the volume of additional information they deserve.

If you are still manually linking, there's no way your link pages can be operating at optimal efficiency. Manually adding links, deleting links, checking for dead and non-reciprocated links, reformatting and uploading link pages, etc. requires way too much thought and far too many hours.

By eliminating 90 percent of the mental gymnastics and physical time required to manage linking campaigns, LinksManager is true path of least resistance to productive, profit-enhancing linking.

If you're not already a subscriber, you should be. It's a no-brainer.