...one labeled "good relevant links" and the other tagged "bad, spammy links."

There's champagne and then there's Dom P or Crystal. There are restaurants and then there are Michelin Five Star eateries. And there are links and then there are LINKS.

Sometimes in selecting link partners, it's easy to fall into the trap of seeing everything in black and white, as if there were two boxes full of links, one labeled "good relevant links" and the other tagged "bad, spammy links."

The reality is that bad links are, in fact, all black. It doesn't matter if they're simply irrelevant to your site's content or if they come from a full duplex link farm or if they live on a notorious domain server -- they're all no good as link partners for your site and you shouldn't use them.

Good links, however, come in many different shades of white. Though all good links will help improve your site's usefulness and appeal to end users and, in many cases, search engines, some will help you more than others and thus have greater value in your overall linking strategy. On the old classic standard scale of one to ten (no, we are not referring to Pagerank), these sites will be eights, nines and tens while "average" good links will rank at five, six and seven.

What are the characteristics of a "ten?"

Good links, however, come in many different shades of white.

To be a ten, or even a nine, a link has, of course, to meet all the requirements of any good link. Its content must be relevant to your site's content, it must originate at a quality site, it must not compete with your site directly, and it should offer your customers something that will interest, inform or educate them.

Eight, nine and ten sites will also have heavy traffic (the more hits a linked site gets, the more people will see your link), be well-known and authoritative in your field of business, have good search return positions on keywords that your prospective customers are likely to search for, and link only to other elite sites.

As you've already guessed, obtaining a reciprocal link from an eight, nine or ten site -- a site meeting the above criteria -- is usually going to be a lot more difficult than getting one from a five or six site.

The generic answer to the question of "how do I get links from sites like that" is make sure your own site is worth an eight, nine or ten rating. More specifically, here are five tips for making your site more attractive to premium linking partners.

1. Make sure your entire site, especially your link pages, is attractive, well laid out and professional looking. Search engine bots can't recognize or rank graphics, but webmasters can. Very few top-quality site operators are willing to link to sites that look like circa-60s psychedelic rock concert posters or junk mail fliers. Always use the graphics tools in your LinksManager control Panel to professionalize the looks of your link pages and match them to the rest of your site. Or ask LinksManager's Helpdesk to update the cosmetics for you.

2. Polish up the copy on your site. Nobody with an intelligent site of their own wants to lower their image by linking to a site that uses bad grammar, contains misspellings or is just plain boring and redundant. Copy is not only king when it comes to influencing customers and search bots, it is equally royal when a webmaster from a top site accepts your invitation to consider your site as a potential link partner.

Its content must be relevant to your site's content, it must originate at a quality site, it must not compete with your site directly, and it should offer your customers something that will interest, inform or educate them.

3. Make sure to offer potential Grade A link partners deep links to and/or from your site. Since home pages tend to be generic, it is quite possible that a prospective partner might have specific pages -- a product information page, for example -- he'd prefer visitors arriving from your site to link to. LinksManager has full support for deep linking and our support staff is more than willing to help you get it set up.

4. Offering a content link is another potential way of positively influencing a choosy prospective link partner. Because links embedded in text on a non-links page stand apart from the other listed and categorized links on the site, they are perceived as getting more hits from end users and more positive attention from search engine bots. There is no real empirical evidence for this perception, but belief in it is strong enough that the offer of a text link might get you a partner when all other inducements have failed. LinksManager's Linklets product makes it easy to provide embedded links into dynamic content. Contact the LinksManager support Helpdesk for assistance in creating Linklets.

5. Regularly use LinksManager's Link Checker results and manual examination to ensure that your link pages are free of dead links, low-quality links and irrelevant links. Sites, like everything else, change over time and one that was highly relevant when you established the link may much less so now. Or a site that looked like an ad in GQ when you linked to it, may have since undergone a re-design by a second-grade finger painter. Link partners, like everyone else, are judged, to one extent or another, by the company they keep. A top webmaster will visit at least a sampling of your existing links before giving you a new one, so make sure they're all up to snuff.

Here's a test about what you just read: What's the most important point of the story?

Answer: The things that have to be done to get the best linking partners are exactly the same things that should be done to make sites the best they can be for end users and search engines. Which should provide all the motivation you need to work through the five steps.

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