When people - and search engine crawlers - follow links from one site to another, they want to find data relevant to whatever subject their guest is inquiring about.

They really are amazing. The numbers, that is. More than 80,000,000 websites containing, conservatively speaking, an aggregate of over six billion pages - many of them potential link partners for your site.

With LinksManager making it almost effortless to receive reciprocal link requests, how does an operator determine which of those 80,000,000 sites will make the best linking partners for his or her own site.

OK, let's get serious. Most of those 80 million sites - theoretically potential link partners though they may be -- have nothing to do with your business. We were just using those raw numbers to make a point. In reality, there are probably no more than a few thousand - or maybe only a few hundred -- top-echelon link partners for your particular business.

The reasons for this are obvious, linked sites should be complementary and compatible, but not competitive. When people - and search engine crawlers - follow links from one site to another, they want to find data relevant to whatever subject their guest is inquiring about. In other words, if they're looking for washing machines and you're an appliance dealer, they want your links to lead them to more information about washing machines they can find within your site. And you want your guests to have that information - as long as they don't get it from a site that also sells washers.

As is immediately apparent, that "don't" rules out a lot of potential linking partners.

If you poke around in the LinkPartners Linking School, you'll find many other articles about linking strategy. You'll learn why you should avoid links to and from bad-neighborhoods, why content is still king, what W3C compliance is, and many other things related to choosing link partners and implementing their links.

The best policy is to show a moderate but steady link-acquisition growth rate.

What you wouldn't find, until now, is any suggestions on how to make the final cut - how to decide who to request links from after you've narrowed the field down to the 5000, 1000, 500 or 50 sites that seem to offer a perfect fit. There is a reason for not soliciting links from all these prospective partners at once. If a substantial number of operators accepted, they'd expect their links to go up on your site right away and adding more than 10 or 12 or 15 links at a time might - probably would - be interpreted by Google as a spam attempt. The best policy is to show a moderate but steady link-acquisition growth rate.

Let's start with the premise that all the prospective link partners on your overly long short list offer information that is equally relevant to your site's content and equally useful to your site visitors. This is crucial because, as we've often said, the most important part of any linking strategy should be end-user optimization.

In refining the list further, there are five questions you should ask and answer in the following order.

1. Will a person be (a.) more or (b.) less likely to buy from you after visiting the outbound link candidate?
2. Is an incoming link from a candidate more likely to send you (a.) serious shoppers or (b.) casual visitors?
3. Is the candidate site (a.) likely or (b.) unlikely to show up on search-engine queries for the products and services you offer. (The easiest way to check this is obviously to make some searches and see; you should also examine the potential candidate's source code and see how well its key words mesh with yours.)
4. Is the candidate site (a.) more or (b.) less popular than other sites offering the same content? (While "popularity" can be defined many ways and some indices are hard to access, a simple Google check "page rank" or "number of links" check will give you some idea.)
5. What is the potential link's effect on your search-engine rankings?

Ignoring the needs of your customers by implementing a link strategy of mass listings instead of class listings will more likely irritate SE ranking programs than please them.

You'll notice that of the five items, the one relating to search engines is listed last. Some people, especially many who earn their living in the SE optimization business, would say that our list is backwards - that the effect on SE rankings should be listed first. Such reasoning is defective because ignoring the needs of your customers by implementing a link strategy of mass listings instead of class listings will not only cost you money through lost sales to people who find such sites unprofessional, it will more likely irritate SE ranking programs than please them.

But that's not the main reason why a link's potential effect on your SE rankings should be the last item on your pre-qualification list: The main reason is simplicity itself. If you can honestly answer "A" to the first four questions, you don't even have to ask yourself the fifth because the links in question are virtually guaranteed to have a positive effect on your search engine rankings - as well as provide a potent value-added resource for site visitors contemplating doing business with you.

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