In this lesson we review the objectives of a fruitful link exchange program, and look at the question "Who you should link with."

What can you achieve with a strong Link Program?

An aggressive link acquisition program is based on very clear objectives. Don't fall into the trap (as I sometimes have) of thinking of your link directory as "a useful resource for my visitors". As the web gets larger and more complicated, these visitor-oriented directories are becoming more difficult to maintain, and less relevant to the surfing habits of web users. Often they are just ways of sending your visitors off to look at somebody else's site.

View your directory as a means of creating traffic for your site. In other words, always ask yourself "What's in it for me to exchange links with this other site, to register with this directory, or to somehow get an inbound link from this or that source?". You should be expecting every link to give you at least one of these three things:

- Direct traffic, especially from some of the high-traffic inbound links.

- Increased Google Page Rank compliments of the PR of the inbound links (I explain this below).

- Improved Search Engine placement for your most important keywords.

Keep these things in mind as you go about exchanging and planting links, because if you can't get any of these three things from a link, then there is not much point in going after it.

Who should you link with?

If you understand (and agree with) what I said in the previous section, then you will see how some links are more valuable than others. So it is those high-value links you should be going after.

But what determines the "value" of a link? Primarily three things:

1. The "relevance" of the text linking to you. This is a fancy way of saying the link text pointing at your site shares the same or similar subject matter as your page.

2. The Google "Page Rank" of the page linking to yours. A higher PR means Google considers that page more important for its subject matter, and links from higher PR pages will result in your own PR (and search engine ranking) being enhanced.

3. The amount of traffic the other page gets. This is usually hard to gauge, but it is obvious that if you want to get direct traffic from inbound links, they will have to be on pages that people actually look at.

In other words, you should be going after links from relevant sites that have a decent PR rating, and that get some real live traffic. You don't need all three of these things for every link. But the more links you can get that do well in these areas, the better your own site will be for it.


You can place your link, or your text ad on at least 30 high value pages — on at least 15 different websites for one low annual fee. Getting high quality links is a great way to increase the Search Engine ranking of your website. For more information about the linknet website promotion opportunity, go to Power Linking Strategies.