Why Do People Link To Sites?

One of the best ways to get consistent traffic to your site
with by getting other webmasters to add your link to their
pages. This results in direct traffic from people clicking on
the links, and indirect traffic because modern search engines
use links to determine how to rank a site in the search engine
results page. The more "quality" links a site has, the higher
it appears in the listings (quality is defined as other higher
ranking sites).

But why do webmasters want to provide links to other sites
anyway? On the surface, this seems to be counter-intuitive, as
a link is a way to leave a site. Why would anyone want to make
it easy for someone to leave a site? In other words, why do
webmasters add links to other sites from their own pages?

If you understand the reasons behind this phenomenon, then you
will be able to get others to link to your site.

To get links you have to give links - This is a very critical
piece of information that you would do well to remember. If you
freely add links to your own site, and those links strongly
reinforce your theme (or themes), then you will find that more
people want to link back to you.

Adding value for visitors - Perhaps the best reason for adding
a link is to add value for your visitors. Let's say you have
written a page about sewing with a nice article, some graphics
and a good layout. To enhance your visitors experience of your
site (and to increase their knowledge) you might include a few
links (one to half a dozen) to quality pages about sewing. These
external pages should provide additional information supporting
your own page and most definitely should fit in with the theme
(the subject) of your site (and page).

It's usually wise to open these links in a new browser window.
This allows your visitors to get the additional information
without leaving your page. When they are finished reading the
referenced material, they simply close the window to return to
your site.

In these instances, you are typically not interested in a link
exchange, per se. Your primary motivation is to add value for
your visitors.

Reference material - If your site contains good reference
materials, it is very possible that other webmasters will want
to link to your pages in order to aid their own visitors. Thus,
it's important to have excellent quality content, both for your
own visitors and for the visitors to other sites.

Articles - It's quite common for webmasters to write articles
which are available for free publication elsewhere. In exchange
for the free content, a link back is usually required. If you
write quality content which is of value to many webmasters, you
will find you can get thousands of links back to your site.

One of the biggest benefits to this method is it is NOT a link
exchange. You do not return the link to the sites which
publishes your articles.

An additional side-effect of this promotional method is you
can get huge (and I mean huge) spikes of traffic for very short
periods of time. I've personally seen my articles published in
major (2 million plus subscribers) and received 500,000 hits in
a single day. This can be very exciting (it is a lot of hits)
but very disconcerting, especially if you unexpectedly exceed
your bandwidth allocation.

Graphics and sets - In a manner similar to publishing articles,
some artists create with is known as linkware. These are images
and sets of images which may be used as long as a link is return
to their site. Again, this is NOT a link exchange. It is
exceptionally good as a linking method, as it's quite common
for people to find a graphic they like and follow the link back
to the artists site to see what else is available.

Affiliates - If you've created a good product, it is an
excellent idea to also form an affiliate plan to get other
people selling your products for you. Each of these salespeople
will be adding links to your site so they can sell your products
and collect their commissions. This has the obvious linking
benefit combined with the possibility of making some money.

Exchanging links - Perhaps the most overt reason is also very
simple: two webmasters simply agree to add a link to each
other's site to their sites. Exchanging links just to exchange
links is perhaps among the worst reason of all. This is often
done just to increase search engine rankings. Usually the
traffic from this form of linking is very poorly targeted and
produces few return visits or sales.

Link farms - Quite some time ago, some intelligent people
figured out they could boost their search engine ranking by
creating pages of links, then distributing those pages to as
may other webmasters who could tolerate them. This worked for
a while, but eventually the search engines caught on. In fact,
they now will often drop a site from their index entirely if a
link farm is discovered. At best, the link farm pages will be
dropped from the index. At worst, the whole site will be banned.

Link Automation products - Several products exist which allow
webmasters to manage their link pages. These are intended to
promote link exchanges by automating the search for sites of
desired themes, as well as handling the administration of
emailing other webmasters.

The problem is that these programs have now become associated
with spam (both email and search engine spam) due to poor
documentation and abuse by individual webmasters. In addition
the purpose of the products is to create link exchanges, which
is not the best form of linking or promotion. There is also a
large amount of anecdotal evidence that some search engines will
penalize or ban entirely a site which uses them in an unchanged
form.

Conclusions - Getting links to their site is one of the most
critical tasks that all webmasters will confront. It is so
critical that it must be done correctly or a site's traffic will
suffer (and sometimes drop dramatically). A very good link could
mean tens of thousands of visitors who click on it directly, as
well as tens of thousands more from the higher search engine
rankings that result.

So work on both getting and receiving links, and remember there
is no need to "do a link exchange". Simple add appropriate,
well-themed links to your site, and give others some incentive
to add your links to theirs.