Suppose you walked into the doctor's office and, instead of being confronted with a wall full of elegantly framed diplomas and professional commendations, you saw a bunch of tawdry posters promoting payday loans?  At the dentist's, you found all the little Plexiglas counter racks that used to be filled with glossy brochures about teeth whitening and brightening stocked with fliers offering you big discounts on DVD pornography.  And what if you stopped by the new car dealership and the gleaming accessory case held nothing but dented hubcaps, cracked taillights, and shredded seatcovers?  How would you describe these situations?  Allow us to supply what we think you will agree is an appropriate word: Weird.  There's also a slightly more technical phrase that covers such phenomena, negative marketing.  What the doctor, dentist, and car dealer in our hypothetical scenario have done is create an ambience virtually guaranteed to drive customers away rather than encourage them to hang around and buy something.  With these examples in mind, it may be useful to examine exactly who your link partners are and what your link pages represent.

Without relevant links - back links by which other web entrepreneurs link their sites to yours and front links which direct your visitors to other useful sites - you will lose traffic directly and indirectly.

Viewed from the perspective of your customers and potential customers sometimes referred to as "end users", your link partners are like diplomas or professional membership certificates.. they tell visitors to your site as much about you as a diploma tells a patient about his or her doctor.  And the pages displaying your links are like the frames holding the doctor's diplomas.  When was the last time you sat in a medical examining room and noticed a dirty, curling diploma stuck to the wall with a rusty nail?  What would you have thought if you saw such a thing?  Would it have induced you to engage that doctor for bypass surgery?  Or fix an ingrown toenail?  Or treat you in any way at all?

Links are an essential element of successful websites. Without relevant links - back links by which other web entrepreneurs link their sites to yours and front links which direct your visitors to other useful sites - you will lose traffic directly and indirectly.  Directly, because no potential customers will be reaching your site via hot links on other sites, and indirectly because sites without links are generally downgraded or totally ignored by search-engines.  Done properly, using LinksManager and LinkPartners as your guides through the cyberspace linking jungle, reciprocal linking is a triple-win situation, good for you, good for your linking partners, and good for your site visitors.  In fact, reciprocal linking can be an incredibly powerful force in propelling your internet venture to a higher level.  Unfortunately, as with most "forces," there is a dark side - irresponsible linking.

Irresponsible irrelevant linking is what our mythical doctor did when he aligned himself with the loan companies instead of the American Medical Association or other relevant medical information.  It is what the dentist did by distributing advertising for smut peddlers.  It's what the car dealer did by hustling used junk instead of new accessories.  One of the most common mistakes people new to e-business make is to assume that somehow the rules are different than they are in more traditional forms of commerce.  This conception, though frequently accepted even by business journalists and others who should know better, is absolutely wrong.  All the tenants of "best practice" that apply to brick-and-mortar businesses also apply to e-businesses.  If your business is mail order and you don't ship orders promptly, the result will be the same whether you sell from a website or a printed catalog, you won't get many repeat customers.  If you have a service business and don't respond to queries, it hardly matters whether the questions come via an online form or a newspaper ad - either way you won't get the business.

It is wise to ask yourself whether the information on the linked site is something that your customers - your site visitors - will find of value.

In terms of link partners, it is wise to ask yourself whether the information on the linked site is something that your customers - your site visitors - will find of value.  If you were making an in-person sales call would you recommend that the customer visit the linked site for more information or complimentary goods and services?  If the answer is yes, you've found a great link partner for your website.  A link that will help your marketing positively by giving your customers information they will be grateful to receive.  A link that will get you "plus" rather than "minus" points from search engine site-evaluation programs.  (For information on how Google, for one, differentiates between responsible linking and irresponsible linking - spam linking, in Googlespeak, click here to read what LinksManager engineers learned from the published 2003 Google patent).

Inappropriate links are not the only pitfall that LinksManager can automatically steer you clear of.  There's also the problem of "missing" links. Have you ever seen an "HTTP 404 - File not found" message?  Of course you have.  Such a message can be generated by a server being temporarily down, an ISP problem at the browser's end or a number of other network related reasons.  But nine times out of ten, it appears because the requested web page simply isn't there anymore.  Maybe it has moved without leaving a forwarding - or, more accurately, a redirect - address.  Or maybe the company or organization owning the page has gone out of business or allowed its domain name registration to expire.  Whatever the cause, having a potential customer click through to a "404" message from your site can raise questions about the credibility of your business.  It can also raise questions with search-engine ranking applications programmed to look at dead links with the same skeptical eye out of which credit bureau scoring applications see overdue accounts.

Having a potential customer click through to a "404" message from your site can raise questions about the credibility of your business

LinksManager's Dead Link checker protects your site visitors from "404" interruptions by automatically checking your links for connectivity and temporarily removing dead entries until they become available again.  LinksManager also automatically searches sites you have added to your link page(s) to see if your link appears on those sites.  Reciprocal linking works best on a two-way street - if all the traffic is going in one direction someone might be getting stiffed.  Searching through dozens - maybe scores -of websites manually to try and find your link is time-consuming and energy draining.  LinksManager's Reciprocal Link Checker system is fully automated, virtually foolproof and on the job 24/7/365.  Powered by Apple's latest XServe technology, LinksManager's Link Checking system is more powerful (and faster) than any link checking script you could install on your server.

Inappropriate or irrelevant links aren't the only way in which a haphazard, ill-considered approach to acquiring and presenting links can negatively impact your site.  There are also, as the old cliché goes, appearances to be considered.  You don't need a college degree in graphic arts or ten years experience as a webmaster to realize that how a site looks, the visual impression it delivers, has a lot to do with how shoppers perceive it.  There is no right or wrong way, really, to design a website.  There are "dos" and "don'ts," of course - forgetting to put a shopping cart on a mail-order site, for example, is a rather obvious don't - but there are no hard-and-fast rules about what colors or typefaces to use, whether to create a Flash site or a regular HTML site, or whether to use one or multiple images on a page.  All those things depend on the nature and number of the products and services offered and the look and feel the site designer is trying to create.

Anything that jars the senses, that looks totally out of place, that appears to have dropped onto the site from some planet the web designer has never visited, is bad

There is one truth that cuts across all categories of sites and businesses, however. Anything that jars the senses, that looks totally out of place, that appears to have dropped onto the site from some planet the web designer has never visited, is bad. With LinksManager's patent pending cosmetic controls, you can simply and easily customize the design and appearance of your links pages and all your link support pages so they blend into and accentuate the rest of your website's graphics, rather than clash with them.  LinkPartners.com, a free editor-based directory of websites which lists sites that exchange links with other sites, offers many time-saving and security advantages to internet businesspeople looking to add appropriate links to their sites.

To understand what LinkPartners.com is, it's important to understand what it is not. LinkPartners.com is NOT a link farm, it does not do any data mining for wholesale lists of link partners or e-mail addresses.  LinkPartners.com is a free association of high-quality website operators who swap links with other top-tier sites.  Unlike other such sites, LinkPartners.com is not fully automated (also termed full duplex).  The editors at LinkPartners.com manually review each site seeking a listing in the directory to ensure that they are legitimate, non-spamming businesses that offer original useful content.  LinkPartners then assists the webmaster (through the use of a LinksManager account) in the link swap request with just a few clicks of the mouse.  Sites without unique content, sites which engage in unethical linking practices, sites which promote illegal, immoral or anti-social activities, and sites of overall low graphic or content quality are regularly rejected for inclusion in the directory.  Truth be told, LinkPartners.com editors actually reject more listings than they approve - because LinkPartners.com is adamant in upholding ethical webmastering and ethical linking guidelines for the betterment of the Internet. 

LinkPartners.com is nothing, more or less, than a productivity tool for web-based businesspeople with more important things to do with their time than sift through thousands of search-engine returns to unearth mutually rewarding linking relationships.  Let's say you're in the sports memorabilia business.  Even a cursory look at the LinkPartners.com search page will suggest numerous types of sites that might make fabulous link partners for you.  First you might check out the categories for all the major sports themselves.  After that there are the celebrity, auction, college and university, magazines, general sports, fandom, and antiques and collectibles categories, to name just a few.  Click on one of the categories and you're presented with a list of potential link partners, a description of each, a thumbnail of the site's home page and, of course, a hot link to the site itself.  Or search the LinkPartners.com directory by keyword or keyphrase for your specific criteria. Combine the partner-finding capability of LinkPartner.com and the automated link request-and-implement-a-link features of LinksManager and you've got the most potent one-two punch in patent-pending, editor-based, linking technology.  Building high-yield, search-engine friendly link pages simply doesn't get any easier than this.  

Using LinkPartners it's easy to locate appropriate link partners who will direct potential qualified customers, rather than just random irrelevant web surfers, to your site

In a world obsessed with statistics, it's sometimes difficult to remember that in business the only numbers that matter are profit and loss.  Think of all the chain stores that have gone bankrupt or out of business in the past decade.  Companies like Kmart and Montgomery Ward and Woolworths.  None of those companies ran into trouble because people stopped visiting their shops - they all had plenty of foot traffic, they just didn't have the merchandise, prices, and/or service to translate that traffic into sales.  Now think of all the companies that disappeared in the dot.com crash of five years ago. ValueAmerica, eToys, Egghead, etc. etc. all had millions of hits but, for whatever reason, people didn't want to buy there.  Toyboutique.com is perhaps a classic example.  It received an average of 500,000 hits a month but failed because, its founder said, it had no buyers for what it was selling.

The relevance of all this to LinksManager and LinkPartners users is obvious. Using LinkPartners it's easy to locate appropriate link partners who will direct potential qualified customers, rather than just random irrelevant web surfers, to your site.  These partners will also provide information and related products and services that visitors coming to your site will find interesting and informative.  LinksManager will make sure all your links work, that your link pages are attractively presented and complementary to your other pages and that you have the opportunity to quickly, easily, and effectively screen all incoming link requests for relevancy.  Used in tandem, LinksManager and LinkPartners also give you an additional - and very, very crucial - benefit that no other linking strategy or product can deliver, more time to concentrate on actually running your business.

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