2. Getting in-bound links to your site is one of the most
important things you can do for generating traffic to your
site:
3. * It helps to get your site listed in the search engine.
4. * It helps to boost your position in the search engine.
5. * It helps to build small streams of traffic to your site.
6. Links to your site are normally given by also giving a link
from your site to the other one. These are called reciprocal
links or link swaps. And naturally there are a few services
available to automate the link somehow.
7. Some of these services will automatically add the link to
your site and the other site once your link request is
approved (through some software to be installed on your
site).
8. Some will simply point you to sites which do use link
swaps and who are interested in hearing from you.
9. Some will also check that the link to your site remains in
place, and email you if it disappears. It's then up to you to
either contact the owner of that site to find out why the
link has vanished, or to remove the reciprocal link on your
site.
10. But there is one thing they do not do, and which you need
to watch for:
11. How would a visitor to the other site FIND the link back to
your site?
12. Because you can be sure that if a human visitor cannot
find it, then it's unlikely that a search engine will.
13. Let me give you an example: Andrew was using the service
at LinkMetro.com to get links to one of his sites. Someone
had a site on a related topic, and they requested a link
back to Andrew's. He checked the link back to his site, and
everything looked OK. The other site had requested a link
back to their homepage (rather than another specific
page), so Andrew checked out that home page.
18. It seemed that the link directory on that other site was not
linked from the home page of that site.
19. The other site was requesting inbound links back to its
home page, but effectively hiding the return link from the
search engines and from website visitors. And that makes
the link back to Andrew's site useless - it's like that link
doesn't even exist.
20. So next time you get asked for a reciprocal link, check the
route that people and search engines would use to get
from that site over to yours. You might be surprised what
you find.