Internet Marketing Australia > Linking to Others Sites using Reciprocal Linking

Should we attract links, or should we be linking to other sites, and why do we suddenly find other sites that we know nothing about, suddenly linking to us?

Search Engines can handle links quite differently, so for this particular article, I shall discuss Australia's two most popular search engines (at this time) and the consequences of linking. i.e. Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo loves links on our site that are enriched by having a text explanation attached to them like this (run your mouse over the link), particularly if they are linked to other pages on your own or another's website containing the same keyword targets.

Yahoo doesn't mind the if the links are linked back to the page that they are on, but a ridiculous number of these is spamming! When a web designer cannot beat your link spammed website through honest means - they will simply report you to Yahoo, and have your site penalised for an undetermined amount of time.

This is why many marketing cowboy sites will link to your site. Introducing the "link thieves" whom are using your keyword rich site (plus thousands of others) to drag up their site, to leap frog over your site in ranking. Some Web Designers will create multiple domains and a kaleidoscope of websites to spam multiple links to achieve this. When this gets out of hand, they should be reported to Yahoo. (Morons *sigh*)

Google gets annoyed by too many links and automatically penalises link farm sites for Spam. It is also rumored that Google prefers to establish your popularity by the number of links to your site, which (from experience) can be on your own or another's website, which is why it is suggested to encourage others to link to you. Again, these sites should have the same key word goals as your site, and more importantly the link itself must use some of your keywords with the link. Google will also take into consider the quality of the websites that have linked to you (i.e. a high ranking website pulls you up).

Personally I think the art of linking is a time wasting exercise for Google, because they really favor web pages that have good content and the keywords placed reservedly within the web page. Links can also be achieved back through your own site again through the use of carefully described the internal page links that identify how to navigate your website.

I tend to agree with Stig's comments below ...

"I`m not an expert on Google but here is my advice,
You do not need Keywords in meta tags, but make sure you have them in your "TITLE"
If you have text, make sure your keywords are in bold, italic or have underline.
example: TITLE: John the carpenter - hammer, nail, saw, house.
Text: Start with: John the carpenter uses hammer and nail when building a house. You can rewrite the text, use your keywords now and then, but not more than 7 times. Sometimes its called spamming.
-Write something with house.
-Write something with hammer and so on..
Have at least 4-5 hyperlinks in your text.
Keywords in the IMG Alt tags
Keywords in the Anchor tags
Keywords on page
Don`t overdo it with keywords
On the bottom of every page, write your keywords in bold
- hammer, nail, saw, house etc.
If you have a competitor, use his keywords also.
I use http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer and Web CEO. Now I`m no.1-5 @ google with several keywords. PageRank 1 after 6 weeks. My competitor got PageRank 4. I`ve spent many weeks in front of the computer trying to figure out how to do it. "

Hint! Google will check the first and last few paragraphs of your web pages to find those all important links.

Much Success!

Articles by MadamSplash

P.S. What's quicker than competing with a Spammer? Report them to the Search Engines!