Inside This Article

1.  Why websites exchange links 2.  How to choose good link partners

3.  User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly Link Directory 4.  How to maintain your link directory

User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly Link Directory



Link Directory is where you categorize and display your link partners' websites information. It looks similar to Yahoo's directory but may not be as complex as that.

User Friendly Link Directory

User friendly link directory should have these characteristics:

• Link directory can be easily found
• Easy to navigate
• Easy to understand link text
• Logically categorize links
• Organize a neat layout

Your link directory should be designed for your visitors rather than your link partners or search engines.

It is also important that the text link to your link directory page should be easily found. Both your visitors and other webmasters will appreciate it. Visitors will find your site useful. It saves other webmasters time if they can find your links page within a couple of seconds or clicks.

Do you want to link to a site that deeply buries the link directory and no one can easily find it? Of course not.

Search Engine Friendly Link Directory

Building a tightly-themed directory which is related to what your website offers is very important in terms of search engine link popularity. Search engine spiders are smart enough to calculate the statistical correlations of your directory and the statistical correlations of the websites you linked to. Common terms and phrases in both sites are evaluated to determine relevancy.

Don't link to FFA (Free For All) pages. Search engines, especially Google, strongly against links on FFA sites. Google mentioned before that you should not link to bad neighborhoods. FFA is bad neighborhood.

Craig Silverstein, Google's Director of Technology, warned "avoid anything that looks skanky. Don't link into bad neighborhoods". Search Engine Strategies Conference, NY City, March 8, 2004.

If you do take the risk, you potentially will face being banned by Google, either in getting zero PageRank value or completely disappear in the SERPs of your targeted keywords. You are responsible for what sites you link to. You are not responsible for what sites link to you.

Fine-tune Your Link Anchor Text

Link anchor text (the linked text that people can see) should depict what the linked page is all about. This is important for both internal links and external links. Avoid something like "Click Here" type of links as it does not tell the search engines what the content of linked page is about.

For example, if you want to link to this article on your site, I prefer a link like this Get More Traffic By Link Exchange rather than something like "To read how to get more traffic by link exchange Click Here".

To get your site rank well for very competitive keywords/keyphrases, the only way getting to the top 10 is to build quality links and use your targeted keywords in the link text. For non competitive keywords, proper keyword density is the way to go because it is easy to implement. After Google's November 2003 search algorithms updates, simply put your targeted keywords in ALL your link text is not enough because Google now treats extensive use of this kind of linking as spam. To maintain good results, do this: Use one keyphrase for the first 200 or so links. Then change your keyphrase and use the new one for another 200 or so links. Then change your keyphrase again and use it for another 200 or so links. Keep doing this way to get more and more links. That means you will have multiple keywords/keyphrases to promote your website. The new Google algorithms like that.

100 Links Per Page as Google Stated in its Webmaster Guidelines

Another point to bear in mind when building link directory is Google advises the number of links on a given page should be no more than 100. To better not to take any chances what you should do is to split your link page if you have more than 100 links on a page.

For example, after adding first 50 links on Business Opportunities category, add "Next Page" link at the end of the first page to direct users to next Business Opportunities category page. To be safe, keep the number of links on any of your link directory pages to be around 50. Having said that, do you really have to worry about what Google said if your link partners bring you more traffic than Google does? You know the answer. In addition, I have seen many good PR websites with more than 100 links on a page.

Good link directory should be a useful resource directory from website visitor's point of view. It should be like a one-stop-shop to give your website visitors reasons to return to your site.

From webmasters point of view, it needs to show them that it is worthy of putting up a link on their sites.

Finally, don't name your directory page as Trade Links or Exchange Links. This gives people the impression of link manipulation. Give a true meaningful and value driven name such as Resource Directory, Resource Page, Web Resources, etc.

To sum up, you should

• Design your link directory for your website visitors rather than for link partners or search engines. That is, make your directory a valuable resources to users.
  
  
• Don't build a hotch-potch link farm. Tighten the theme of the directory.
  
  
• Pagenate your link directory pages with 50 links on each page.

Creating your link directory is only the first step, maintaining it regularly also takes time. Follow the link to next page to see how to manage it efficiently.


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Inside This Article 1.  Why websites exchange links 2.  How to choose good link partners     3.  User Friendly and Search Engine Friendly Link Directory 4.  How to maintain your link directory Other Recent Articles from the Internet Marketing category: 1. Why websites exchange links