Article by LinksManager.com Staff - © 2008, Reproduction without permission prohibited.

As with any business decision, the first question you have to answer when considering whether to add a reciprocal linking component to your site promotion initiatives is "why?"

Unlike many business decisions, this one is a no-brainer. Adding quality, relevant reciprocal links to your site is an incredibly cost-effective, easy and effective way to make your site known to both end users and search-engine bots.

This wasn't always the case. Back in the day before modern browsers, Google and other link-popularity driven search engines, and LinksManager, reciprocal linking was more commonly used by hobby and other non-commercial site operators to reach out and touch each other across the wide expanses of cyberspace.

The prevailing wisdom among e-businesspeople of the early and mid-1990s was that once a potential customer reached a website he or she should be treated as a captive and not be allowed to leave until they bought something.

This strategy, rooted in an ancient used-car dealer practice called "tossing the keys on the roof" (the dealer would take the potential customer's trade-in for a test ride and later pretend to have lost the keys so the customer couldn't easily drive off the lot), became untenable when Google made "old-technology" search engines based solely on keyword frequency obsolete.

Google, which -- now, as well as at its inception -- bases its ranking decisions largely on "the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B," made adding links virtually a necessity for commercial site operators.

It also, inevitably, gave birth to a whole industry dedicated to "beating the system" by developing linking schemes designed to spam Google by stuffing its "ballot boxes" with bogus links that would, the promoters claimed, be counted as "votes."

Though some of these unethical scams work for a short while, Google and the other search engines spend millions of dollars to identify and neutralize them. Unfortunately for site operators who fall prey to the temptations of search-engine serpents offering tainted apples, this "neutralization" usually takes the form of exiling sites employing black-hat linking practices to the search engine netherworld. In extreme cases, sites are dropped from search engine indexes entirely.

Staying On The Search Engines' Sunny Side

First the short-form good news. Obtaining the site promotion benefits of a healthy, robust linking program without violating any search-engine guidelines or W3C best practices is as easy as subscribing to LinksManager and using it properly. For over ten years, we have been constantly refining and updating LinksManager in lockstep with changing search engine requirements. We have also spent -- and continue to spend -- an untold number of dollars and person hours to make it virtually impossible for our subscribers to inadvertently wander off into the linking dark side.

LinksManager makes it easy to not offend the search engines. The other side of the coin is equally important, how to structure your linking campaign to obtain maximum beneficial results from Google and the other engines.

First, foremost, and forever, examine every link you consider adding to your site and every site you are considering putting your link on from your customer's point of view. Forget -- as much as any of us ever can -- about the search engines. When it comes to links, GoogleBot and its cousins are very much like homo sapien site visitors -- they want to find links to sites providing useful, relevant information, links that add value to the content on your site rather than detract from it.

Coca-Cola™ Is A Brand, So Is Your Website

Ask yourself this, "what impact will a link to this site have on my brand and my brand image?"

What makes this a particularly good question is the fact that linking is primarily a branding function, specifically a branding extension function. You may never have thought of it this way, but your website is a brand in the same way that much larger sites -- say, Amazon.com -- are brands.

In its early days, Amazon spent tens (some say hundreds) of millions of dollars to extend its brand via placements (essentially commissionable links) on affiliate sites. Reciprocal linking provides much the same sort of brand extension without requiring you to pay an affiliate a commission on the sales that come to you via the linked site.

Since you are, in a very real sense, stamping your brand on any site that carries your link, it's important to consider whether association with that site will polish or tarnish your brand's image. Is the site's subject and area of focus relevant and compatible with yours? I s it a quality site, well-written and well designed? Are its other links relevant, attractively presented and intelligently organized?

If this all sounds like a lot of things to check before adding a link to your site, it really isn't ... two or three minutes wandering around a site that has requested a link from you or one you are thinking about requesting a link from should tell you all you need to know.

Or, you can shorten the process even more by requesting a link from an appropriate site listed on LinkPartners.com, a free directory of link-seeking sites which have been examined and approved by qualified editors.

Despite the advance from keyword-counting to link-popularity search engines, the technological sea change from black words on gray backgrounds to streaming media, the revolutionary nature of shopping on eBay instead of in secondhand stores, the web is still what it has always been, a computer network based entirely on links between pages. The more good links you have the more golden opportunities you have to attract customers to your website.

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