Website Linking Practices and Quality Guidelines

There is only one quality guideline that you need to be concerned with when starting a new online business. This is the top most important thing you can do to make a successful website. You need to ask yourself one question, does this site benefit my users?

Focus on a good user experience. Deceptive practices include and are not limited to ... Creating many multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with basically the same content. And placing links on the pages to boost your exposure and rank.

The link position and contrast on your page can affect your click through rate. Which is literally all your profit from paid per click, PPC ads. As a general rule links on the top half of a page, or above the fold perform better than the links on the lower parts of a page. Above the fold, means the visible part of the page a user can view without scrolling. Finding the best ad position on your pages is largely a trial and error process, placing the same or similar ads in different positions on serval pages with the same traffic patterns will help you zero in on the best performing page locations. Your text ads should not contrast with your page, they should blend in and appear as a natural part of the website page. The color scheme should match your page closely and the text size and font should match other site links on your pages. You do not need to, nor should you encourage a user to click on ad links. If you have a useful interesting site your visitors will naturally explore what your site offers including ads that might benefit your visitor by providing needed products or services.

If you choose to participate in an affiliate program and market a product that someone else offers keep in mind that you need to stand out from the crowd. Add something that others do not offer, this gives extra value to your users.

A link farm is any group of sites that link to every other web site in the group, no matter what the content might be. Your focus must stay on quality not the quantity of back links. It is better to have a couple of links on sites that are relevant to your site, than to have hundreds of back links from sites that are entirely irrelevant to what you offer.

Contacting other site owners with link requests is a great way to get exposure for your site. Contact sites with relevant content to yours that are not direct competitors. It is a good idea to offer a link swap where you will be placing a link back to their site. Take the time to study their website, comment on the best pages and spots on the page where you would like the links placed. Explain the benefit of linking to your site as it will give visitors to both sites quality information and access to what they are seeking. Offer an equal swap, a front page link for one of the same. Or a page link for one on an equally valuable page. Not every site you contact will be interested, most likely only a small number of sites will agree to a link. This is a slow process, it is a good idea to make it a regular routine, done at least one day every week.

Paid text links are a good source of one way inbound links. They are available on many sites at very reasonable rates. Again make sure they are placed on sites with content relevant to your page.

When a search spider finds your site, it is important you provide clear link paths for spiders to follow through your website. Provide easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages on your site. You can also provide advanced help for search spiders with basic site map text files and robots.txt files. You will need to visit the various search engine sites as they all are a little different. The way you submit and use these types of files varies a little on different search sites. A site map text file is basically a list of the urls of your site. Also you may want to create an XML file that lists the Urls for a site. XML site maps allow you to include additional information about each Url.
You can find a link to the W3C Free Link Checker and other great free tools on our web master tools page.