"...the more you know about linking, the heavier the traffic to your online showroom will become."

While not exactly as jam packed as the Harvard Business School course catalog or even the list of classes at the local junior college, the LinksManager/LinkPartners Link Exchange 101 Academy does have a pretty extensive curriculum -- perhaps more lessons than you have time to work through before beginning to build your reciprocal-linking program.

These "crib-sheets" contain crucial information distilled from a number of the full lessons and combined into one article -- a kind of Cliff's Notes for Link Exchange 101 designed to put you on the fast track to establishing a link building campaign that will brand your site within its realm of interest, drive relevant traffic to your site, have a favorable impression on search engine bots, and be free of any elements that might even remotely be considered unethical or "spammy" by Google and the other search engines.

That said, we strongly advise that you read the full lessons -- at least the ones on subjects you may not be completely familiar with -- whenever you get the time. As is true in regard to most aspects of running a successful business, knowledge equals profit. The more you know about the products you sell, the better your sales ratio will be. And the more you know about linking, the heavier the traffic to your online showroom will become.

Propagation, Deep-Linking Benefits & Keyword and Anchor Text Variations

Anything worth doing is worth doing as fast as possible, right?

If establishing one links page with ten carefully selected, compatible, relevant links on Monday is good, putting up nine more pages with ten links each on Tuesday is better. Isn't it?

No and no. Absolutely not. Almost nothing will shoot your website in the search-ranking foot as surely and painfully as massively infusing links into it.

Perhaps you've already encountered the phrase "natural links." And maybe you already know that a natural link is one that was acquired by direct agreement between the operators of sites containing information that complement each other, content that will be useful, interesting and informative to visitors of both sites.

"Almost nothing will shoot your website in the search-ranking foot as surely and painfully as massively infusing links into it."

An "unnatural link" is, generally speaking, one that was obtained through a full duplex program that promises to establish hundreds or thousands of links to a site automatically, purchased from a link farm that exists solely to provide generic links of dubious parentage to any and all comers, or gathered through any one of numerous flaky strategies that Google lumps under the umbrella title of "search-engine spam schemes."

To make a long story short, since this is the Crib Sheet version, the surest way to recognize a natural (good) link from an unnatural (bad) link is that natural links generally are free and can only be established with human permission. Someone, either the site owner or a designated employee, must click something, somewhere that says "I want to add this link to my site."

(Note: That isn't the same thing as saying all manually added links are good links, just that they're natural.)

Unnatural links, on the other hand, almost always involve some form of payment and automatic solicitation and posting of links.

Search engine crawlers like Googlebot understand the difference between natural links and unnatural links perfectly because they trend how often you obtain links and, therefore, expect natural links to propagate in a natural manner. In other words, they expect them to be appear on your site at a slow, steady, believable rate of accrual.

Look at it this way. The average domestic cat mother usually gives birth to between six and eight kittens per litter and typically -- if owned by a suitably irresponsible individual -- produces four litters a year. To use a phrase from the cattle business, that's her natural rate of increase.

If the cat started birthing 27 kittens a litter 11 times a year, it would be unnatural and even the most dense cat owner would notice something odd. Googlebot is not in the slightest dense and if your site starts "throwing" links like our prodigal cat, it will notice the oddity, consider it unnatural, and possibly subtract a bit from the ranking value of your links.

Another reason for putting your links up on a regular schedule -- say ten this week, another ten the following week, maybe 15 the third week -- is that search engines look for consistency in all areas of a site and also, sometimes, give more consideration to fresh links and less to old ones.

Now that you've acquired some quality link partners with relevant sites, you should consider where you'd like people to wind up when they click your link on one of those partner's sites.

Traditionally, links go directly to a site's homepage, but following that particular tradition can cost you money.

Take, for example, a site that sells extended life batteries for portable electronic devices. The webmaster of that site establishes a link with a site offering cell phone ring tones, wallpaper and game downloads. The sites are well matched, relevant to each other and highly compatible since the link puts multimedia phone application users -- who tend to run through batteries fast -- in touch with a good source of high-output batteries and high-output battery customers in touch with a vendor of the type of multimedia content they may favor.

"Traditionally, links go directly to a site's homepage, but following that particular tradition can cost you money..."

So far, so good. But the battery site is kind of generic ... the home page is mostly navigation links for everything from iPods, to Palms, to handheld Nintendos, digital cameras and, somewhere, cell phones. Clearly, it would be much more seamless and user-friendly if the "Triple Your Talk Time With High-Energy Cell Batteries" link on the ring-tone site opened the battery site's cell phone subpage instead of the site's homepage.

That's called deep linking and if you don't consider it a valuable tool, you probably don't know that researchers at the highly respected Nielson Norman Group found that 27 percent of internet no-sales are caused by consumers reluctant to wade through navigation menus to get from a site's home page to the specific product page they're interested in.

The last topic for this Crib Sheet concerns the relationship between link text, anchor text and keywords.

Unless you're a one-product businessperson (say you've invented a 300mpg fuel-injection system) or a highly specialized professional (a surgeon with a practice limited to separating Siamese twin) it's generally desirable to optimize your links to more than one keyword or key phrase.

Since search engines frown on keyword stuffing whether it appears in home page copy, articles or link text, the best way to accomplish this is to have some of your links refer to one set of keywords and other links to a different set.

Let's say you're an online shoe vendor who carries 15 lines of shoes and you have 150 link partners. Putting the names of all 15 shoe companies in a link line on all 150 linked pages could have negative consequences because search engines have recently been showing some irritation at endless laundry lists. Fifty links each containing five of the company names, on the other hand, would be a very nice distribution.

"...have some of your links refer to one set of keywords and other links to a different set."

It might also seem, at first glance, a very time consuming and tedious thing to do. But not when you're using LinksManager. With LinksManager, you can go to your Control Panel, enter new link text once and have it automatically applied to every new link you add while your existing links retain their original text. When you acquire enough new links (50 in our example) with the second set of keywords, just type some new ones in the anchor text fields in your LinksManager control panel and they'll be applied to the next batch.

It's so simple you don't even have to change your basic text. If the existing version says something like "World's largest online source of tennis shoes from Nike, Reebok and other major companies" all you have to do is erase Nike and Reebok and type in Converse and ASICS.

That's it for this Crib Sheet. You may not be ready for your Linking School diploma but you've hopefully acquired some info-tidbits to help maximize your link program's potential.

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