When looking for sites to link back to your site, look for sites having a higher page ranking than yours and are related to your site in some way. Higher-ranked sites help up your page ranking more than lower- ranked sites. Although, just about any site that links to your site will be a plus. Links of this nature are called one-way links.



Another type of link is a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is linking back to the other website that is linking to you. Make certain the other website retains your link on their site. If they do remove your link, ask them to put it back. On the other hand, you can remove their link from your site.

In addition, set up a trade links page. When you do, it should contain pages that are sub-categories (i.e. marketing, investing, real estate). By doing this, it is much easier for you to maintain the list of links. The other reason is that you do not want to have over 20 outbound links on any given page. What do I mean by outbound links? An outbound link is any link that points to any web page that is not part of your website.

Indexed pages verses ranked pages

There is a difference between having your website or web page indexed verses ranked. To have your website indexed; search engines crawl your site at least once, know about your site, and insert your URL into their index of sites to crawl.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to have your site indexed is to include your URL in a message on a blog or forum that has a lot of traffic. Another way, although it is slower, is to submit articles and press releases.

Page rank is harder to come by. Three things determine the page ranking of your site: use of keywords in the content of your site; how many sites link back to your site and the quality of those sites (link popularity); and the text that these sites have used to link to you (anchor text).

When your site has a page rank, it usually means that you are receiving a fair amount of traffic and are building up what is called back links. Back links come when another site puts your link on their site. If, at all possible, you want to link with sites that have a page ranking of 3 or above.

Things to stay away from

Here are some things that can get you banned from search engines:

* Hidden text

o This is when you make the font color the same as the background color so that your customers are not able to see the wording. A way to check if sites are doing this is to press (Ctrl A). You could hide keywords in the body of your web page and no one will see them. You could also put other content on the page that no one would see but the search engines.

* Hidden links

o This is the same thing as hidden text only you do it with links. Let's say on your squeeze page you want to put a link to another page on your website, but you don't want anyone to go there, for whatever reason. This would be an example where you would hide the link and run a chance of having your site banned from the search engines.

* Keyword stuffing

o Keyword stuffing is using the exact same keyword repeatedly and in your alt tags, Meta tags, and title tags. This practice could get you banned from search engines. If you use your keywords in these tags and they are not repeated more than three times in each tag, you should be fine.

* Page cloaking

o A cloaked page is a page created to be invisible to the regular visitor of your website. The cloaked page contains code in it to detect when a search engine spider comes on the site. The spider is diverted to this cloaked page, which is set up to make your site look like one thing to a search engine in order to increase your search engine position on searches. What your customer sees is something entirely different.

* Doorways or bridge pages

o Doorway or bridge pages use the same concept as a cloaked page, but usually are located at different web hosting companies.

* Link Farms

o Link farms are "black hat" (taboo). Link farms are sites that consist of links to other sites and advertising of some sort. Their main goal is to provide a link to other sites and make money off advertising. There is usually no valuable content at all on these sites.