One of the most important factors in organic search engine optimization is incoming links to your site.
Simply put, this means getting other websites to link to yours. These incoming links serve two main functions.
- The search engines find your site by following links from other sites. In general, you want the search engines to visit your site as often as possible, especially if you have a dynamic site.
- The search engines credit your site with popularity based on the number and quality of incoming links it has. The core principle behind this is that if the owner of a site is willing to send his/her visitors to you – he/she must like your site. It is a strong vote of popularity.
A Client Link Exchange Page
Of course, incoming links can also just bring traffic to your site, with no help from the search engines at all. People click them.
There is no evidence that a reasonable number of outgoing links on a website causes any problems with the search engines.
Therefore, partnering with like-minded website owners to create a link exchange can be mutually beneficial.
Enter The Net operates a link exchange for its clients. The premise is quite simple. We create a page of links to all of our participating clients. We then place that page on each of their sites.
The end result is that all of our clients are linked to each other. Over the years, this has proven to be very successful. We can check the results of the link exchange by asking the search engines what incoming links it sees for any page of any site.
Here are some examples:
Meridian Natural Medicine Link Exchange Page
Teri Alameda Safety Consulting Link Exchange Page
How to see what incoming links the search engines recognize.
This works for Google and Yahoo.
- Go to Google or Yahoo.
- In the search dialog box, type (no quotes, though) “link:http://www.[yoursite.com]“
- The results will show you who the search engines see as linking to you. Keep in mind that Google is very tight about recognizing incoming links and Yahoo is very loose. Even one or two Google-recognized links can be helpful.
So, try this experiment.
- Leave the Meridian Natural Medicine Link Exchange Page open.
- Open a new tab or window, go to Google, type link:http://www.meridian-nd.com into the search box and click Search.
- See if any of the links listed there appear on her link exchange page. If they do, it shows the power of the link exchange.
- Try the same with Yahoo.
Some people worry about linking to sites they do not know all that well. Enter The Net places a disclaimer at the top of each page. Also, the link exchange page is NEVER part of the main navigation of the site. It has to be linked from the main site in order to be found by the search engines, but that link is usually found in an obscure place.
Cool article!