Gone are the days when you could simply beef up the number of keywords on your web site and then find yourself at the top of the rankings. Too many webmasters were guilty of keyword stuffing and producing pages that were simply there to fool the search engines into thinking that they were good quality pages. Search engines such as Google now employ rather more checks before they are convinced that your site should be at the top of their rankings.

Google employs a system called PageRank. This is a measure of the number of other sites that link to yours. Those other sites also need to be good quality web sites and be relevant to the theme of your site if they are going to boost your own site's PageRank. If lots of good quality web sites link to your site then Google reasons that you must have a good site otherwise why would those sites link to you? Lots of good incoming links is good news for your Google ranking and PageRank.

The way to discover your site's current PageRank is to grab yourself a free Google Toolbar and then set the Options such that the "PageRank and Page Info" box is ticked. This will add a bar on the toolbar measuring the PageRank of every page that you visit including your own. You need to aim for as high a PageRank as possible.

Your PageRank will rise in time as Google learns of other sites that link to yours. This can be a slow process but a site with a zero page rank will rarely find itself highly ranked. You need to work away at finding as many locations as possible willing to give you a link. Inevitably, they will expect you to link back to them so a Links page on your site is required.

The following gizmo checks the status of your site using various criteria across several top search engines -

Your Links Page
Your Links page should contain a simple form asking others to apply for an exchange of reciprocal links with you. Ask them to give you their site's URL, title and description. You can give them your site's details on the same page and ask them to upload your link promptly. See our Links Page to see how our form works and how we set out our criteria.

One of our requirements when agreeing these links is to insist that our link on their site goes onto a page that has a Google PageRank value of at least 1. If we have a new site to promote ourselves that doesn't have a PR of its own then we cannot always insist on this condition but it is better to have links from pages with a PR if at all possible.

Relevance
Once you let it be known that you are receptive to link exchanges, you will inevitable receive loads of inappropriate link requests: pills, potions, gambling, ringtones, adult material, etc. Just delete them. These people employ scattergun tactics to try to fool people into adding these links to their sites. Make it clear that when you ask for a link, that only relevant sites should apply.

You will also wish to reject links from sites that are in competition with you for fear of losing your customers to them. Additionally, we insist that there be a clear click-able route from their home page to their links page (without going via a script e.g. a search box) and that our link is not placed amongst a huge list of other links.

Finding Links
Locating sites that you can swap links with can be a time-consuming business. Where would you begin to find possible candidates? Well, here's a good tip. Have a good look through your competitors' web sites and check out their links pages. You will find there many other sites that are open to link with. Visit these sites and propose link exchanges with them. Also take a look at their links pages and work your way through the sites listed there to find even more sites to link with. And so on and so on.

We have a number of sites on our books where links are welcomed. Please check out our Link-able Sites page where you will find details of sites and how to find their link pages.

Link-seeking is a service that we offer ourselves. If you find that it becomes all too much trouble to keep looking for links, then please do ask us about this service - Email Us.