Turn Your Links Page Into a Topical Directory

To rank well in the search engines you need incoming links.  Search engines consider an incoming link a vote for your page. That link will be more valuable if it comes from a site that is somehow related to your site's topic, and if the link anchor text includes your keywords.

In a previous article, we discussed reciprocal linking and outlined a process to get high quality inbound links.  This article will explain how to organize your reciprocal outbound links to provide greater value and mutual benefit to you and your link partners.

It is normal practice to place reciprocal outbound links in a special page called "Links".  My suggestion is to turn that "Links" page into a high-quality, specialized topical directory.  The reason is that "Links" pages are not very well regarded by search engines, especially if they are just a random, unorganized collection of links, with no description and little relation to each other.

Good directories, on the other hand are especially important to search engines, due to the fact that they help them analize what a web page is about and assign those pages the proper relevance under certain search terms.

For example, if you are a real estate broker, you can call your Links page "Real Estate Resource Directory" and populate it with reciprocal links to non-competitive industry-related sites.  Examples of non competitive sites in this case would be: home inspector sites, mortgage broker sites, property appraiser sites, handymen sites, roofing company sites, etc. You can create special sections for each of these categories to make your directory more organized and easier to navigate.

Since all of these sites will have placed a reciprocal link to your site, you will gain a great deal of search engine visibility when the search engines crawl those sites, plus your page will receive a relevance boost under real estate related search terms.

Remember that you have the prerrogative to choose your link partners. The key here is to resist the temptation to exchange links with everybody and anybody.  To search engines, link quality is more important than link quantity. Choose as link partners only those that will add value to your directory and help increase your topical relevance with the search engines.

A high quality directory of reciprocal links will benefit you because more people will want to link to you, helping you get more links.  It will also benefit your link partners because your directory page will most likely achieve decent Pagerank, which will make your outbound links more valuable.

Your last steps are:

• Generate adequate description and keyword meta tags for your directory page (although meta tags haven't been taken into account by search engines lately, Yahoo! is apparently paying attention to them again).
• Link to your Directory page from your homepage. To do this, it is better not to use the anchor text "Links" but instead to use the word "Directory", and to provide more specifics in the Title attribute of the link's HTML code (in our example, the HTML code would read: <a href="directory.html" title="Real Estate Resource Directory">Directory</a>.
• Don't title your page "Links". Instead name it under your topic plus the word 'directory' in your Title tag (in our example, the HTML code for the page title would read: <title>Real Estate Resource Directory</title>).
• Make sure that your Directory page is picked up by the search engines.  If your homepage is crawled regularly and you have placed a link to your Directory in your homepage, it will be easily found and added to the S.E. index.

If you are really serious about creating a reciprocal links directory, Arelis is probably the best tool you can use.  Arelis is an excellent software product that scouts the web for you looking for potential link partners (as oppossed to just sorting through a manually-compiled directory, like other products).  Arelis still lets you contact your link partners manually, which results in better quality link partners than when a totally automated, impersonal process is used.

You can freely reprint this article provided that you include the following resource box:

Mario Sanchez is a Miami based freelance writer who focuses on Internet marketing and web design topics.  He publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a growing collection of web design and Internet marketing articles, tips and resources.  You can freely reprint his weekly articles in your website, ezine, or ebook.

Resources:

Arelis Reciprocal Link Building Software:  Reciprocal links add value to your web site, let your web site visitors return to your site, and you'll get targeted traffic from clicks of your links on other web sites. Developing and maintaining high quality links to your web site is essential to the success of your business. ARELIS helps you to achieve that goal.

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