Netallianz Web Design

Most of us know that it is important to get other websites to link to us. When designing your website, consider employing a linking strategy to increase your website value and boost your search engine rankings. There are basically 4 types of linking strategies that you can employ:

Reciprocal Linking
Website 1 links to Website 2, and Website 2 links back to Website 1.

One-Way Linking
Website 1 links to Website 2.

Triangular Linking
Website 1 links to Website 2, Website 2 links to Site 3, Website 3 links back to Website 1. This linking technique involves 3 or more websites.

Directory Linking
Getting your website listed in directories, eg. Exactseek and Searchsight

Reciprocal linking has lost much of its luster nowadays. Due to overwhelming abuse by websites using mass reciprocal linking programs, search engines like Google have degraded the value of reciprocal links. It is likely that linking to another website which links back to you will reduce the value of the incoming link. However reciprocal linking still remains relevant and using a mixture of all 4 linking techniques will make your website appear more natural.

As a website owner, it’s probably best to use a combination of all four techniques and to get your incoming links to look as natural as possible.

So what does it mean to make your links look “natural”?

If you are buying your incoming links, consider the rate at which you plan to build up your links. If you have just designed and launched your website, it does not look very natural for you to have acquired 5,000 incoming links within a few weeks of launching. In contrast, it would be more natural for an established website which has good traffic to acquire 5,000 links during the same period.

It would be more natural if your link description is different across the different websites that are linking to you. If you have hundreds of incoming links using the same description of your website, it may raise a red flag for some search engines.

It is also important to have links inbound from different ranking sites. If all the websites linking to you have Google PR of 6 or 7, it does not look very natural and you could be sending a message that you have purchased those incoming links, a big No-No as far as Google is concerned. It wouldn’t hurt to also have a large number incoming links coming from PR1 and PR2 pages.

High Value Links
Aim for some High Value links. The best incoming links to get are one-way links from content pages which have a high Google PR. This is the hardest type of links to get. You usually need quality and relevant content that is worthy for other websites to link to.

Web Design & Link pages
Many websites are designed with multiple link pages or sections. It is usually a good idea to limit each page to 25-30 outgoing links. Sometimes it is necessary to have several link sections in your website to cater for the different link programs you participate in. Bear in mind that the total outgoing links from your website should not overwhelm your content pages. For example if you only have 10 pages of web content, do not create 20 link pages as this could hurt your search engine rankings.

About the Author
Larry Lam is a Web Consultant with Netallianz.com, a leading Web Design, Web Hosting and SEO firm in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. Larry is a consultant to many businesses in Malaysia and is involved in implementing web design and website marketing solutions.