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Choose Your Website Cross-Links Wisely

It pays to be careful when you decide to link with a site.  Choosing the wrong Website will diminish your credibility and could result in being penalized by the search engines.  Sticking to relevant sites that you have personally reviewed is the recommended way of building your Website traffic and search engine ranking.

Everyone who has a Website and seeks to establish cross-links is solicited by a variety of sites, some good and some bad.  It helps to establish the criteria for the sites with which you will consider linking before engaging in this activity.  If your goal is to drive qualified traffic to your Website and to enhance your appeal to search engines, then you must be selective about the sites with which you exchange links. 

Only trade links with complementary sites whose products or services are relevant to your offerings.  A real estate site that cross-links to a casino site, for example, is not acting in the best interest of its visitors.  It may even be penalized by search engines such as Google for attempting to build ranking with irrelevant cross-links.  Ideally, the site linking to your Website should attract a clientele that would also be interested in what you offer.  Thus, anyone who clicks on your link is pre-qualified and is more likely to purchase something from you. 

Search engines have gotten smarter.  They can distinguish between relevant links and those that represent “links for links sake,” and your site ranking will suffer consequently.  Never, ever sign up for a link farm or seek links from irrelevant sites simply because they already have a high search engine ranking.  Those failed strategies are now the kiss of death among leading search engines.  It is best to only sign up with cross-linking services that allow you to be very selective in trading links. 

It is better to have a small number of good cross-links than a large number of irrelevant links.  Choose wisely and over time you will benefit from increased traffic that actually contributes to your revenues and organic search engine ranking.

 About the Author

Al Kernek is a small business marketing consultant and the author of  "Put Your Business Online."  To learn more about increasing sales using low-cost, effective Internet marketing techniques, visit www.smallbizsmartmarketing.com