Links
Modern
search engines analyze which web sites are linking to your website.
Not
all web site links are equal. One link from a very popular website is more
valuable than a hundred links from obscure personal pages (although 100 links
from obscure web pages is still a lot better than no incoming links at all).
There
are bad incoming links. The search engines are pretty good at spotting “link
farms” (web sites that exist just to give links to other web sites, usually for
a fee).
Having
a link from a link farm is really bad for your web site. The major search
engines will immediately count these links against you and if you have enough
links from link farms or even one link from a really notorious link farm you
may find that your web site ends up getting banned.
It
is a good idea to trade links with other websites that are related to your
field. Sending out e-mails to people with popular websites is usually just
going to create problems (you might get banned for being a spammer). But as you
socialize and do business with other people who are in the same field with you,
you can ask them in person if they might be willing to trade links with you.
Web
rings aren’t as useful as they were in the 1990s, but placing yourself on a
monitored web ring can be useful. Monitored means that a human actually approves
each new web site added to the web ring.
Also,
it can be useful to add one or two really good outgoing links to each of your
web pages. The search engines will notice that you are linking to web sites
that they already know are good websites and will give you a slight boost in
ratings for this.
And,
of course, make sure that your outgoing links stay current. The search egnines
will downgrade you for having links that don’t work anymore. A skilled web
master can create an automated web bot that can periodically check your
outgoing links and let you know if any of them stop working.