One of the most important steps you can take in promoting your website is to develop an ethical linking strategy. In fact, the number of relevant links to your web site has a significant impact on your search engine ranking. There are two main areas to keep in mind with building your links pages.

Links should be Relevant

Having a relevant linking strategy can add value to your site by providing additional resources to your visitors and because you will receive traffic from other similar like minded sites which have links to you. In the past many webmasters simply went for the sheer number of links without regard to whether they were relevant or not. What is meant by relevant links is that the links should be from and to sites which are similar to yours in content and topic. For example, an auto related website might want to link with auto insurance or auto detailing sites. While it is not necessary that all of your links are as closely related as the above example, you should try to stay as relevant as possible.

Page Rank

When linking with other sites you should also try to link with sites that have a higher page search engine page rank than yours because this will help to increase your page rank as well. Page rank is very important. For instance, 100 links coming to you from sites with a page rank of 5 are basically equal to 1 link from a site with a page rank of 8. And it only takes one link from a site with a page rank of 8 to get your site up to a page rank of 5. It most cases, it is difficult to link with sites that have a page rank of 7 or 8 without paying for it. Typically you will want to look for link exchange with that have a rank of 4 or 5. Linking with lower ranking web sites could actually hurt your page rank until the ranking of those sites improves.

Developing your links pages can be very time consuming. One of the easiest way to get started is by working with a link exchange service. Linsmanager.com is one such service which handles everything for you for about $20 per month. They will even help you build your links page to match your website. Once you are set up all you have to do is browse through member sites and choose sites you want to link with. With only a click you can send the site a request for link exchange and their site is automatically added to your links page. Once they approve your it is added to their links page. It is that simple and is well worth the $20 per month.

There are other link exchange programs out there as well. Do some research and find one you are comfortable with. Above all, develop a linking strategy and you will eventually see your page rank and consequently your traffic increase.