Trading links is critical to online success. Yet most links pages are defective! The worst ones can have nine near fatal flaws. How does yours stack up? As a veteran link exchanger I've spent countless hours in front of my monitor. Like a Vegas slots player hoping to hit the jackpot, err, I meant to say looking for prime candidates. So I qualify to spell out fatal flaws all too many links pages suffer from. Make it Easy to Connect the Dots By that I mean make it easy to trade links. Would it kill you to put instructions right on your links page? Or at least link to the add URL page? Along the same lines: Tell Me What You Want Do us both a favor and supply your link text. Both what it looks like and the HTML version to cut and paste. Yeah, I can pull it from the links page I found you on. But why make me work? Don't Treat Contact Info Like Buried Treasure You'd think some webmasters were in the witness protection program they make it so hard to find where to email. Put which email address to use or the link to your contact page in plain view. Do I Qualify? Don't make me guess. List any qualifying criteria you have. For instance if you'll only trade links with certain types of sites or the links page must have so much PR - say so. Be a Specialist Avoid trying to be all things to all people. Doesn't bring you targeted traffic. Doesn't send such link partners targeted traffic. Trade links with like minded sites and all will be better off. Use Categories Set up your links page to be truly useful rather than like a ball lost in tall weeds. In other words don't just throw up a laundry list of listings. My eyes glaze over when I see a long unorganized roster of 63 sites. Who's gonna sift through that to find what they need? This Ain't No Yellow Pages Avoid a multi-page directory. Why? It costs PR for each level down you go. You see if your directory page is a PR 5, each links page in another folder will at best be a PR 4. So it's better to have an index on the same page as all the links. Ideally with internal page jumps that take visitors to the appropriate category. With another back to the top.
Here's help with that:
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/pagejump.html Don't Pass Go or 100 Links Per Page The googlebot gets tired. 100 links on a page is all it will follow. Be fair. Don't shortchange anyone by exceeding that. As you approach 65 links create a second links page. Just be sure to put the link to that on all your pages too. So you're distributing PR to any subsequent links pages just as you did for the first one. Let Me Know Just like some guys don't call after the first date, some webmasters never reply to a link exchange request. Was it something I said? We're ALL busy. Please give all link inquiries THAT QUALIFY the courtesy of a reply. Or else say on your links page you're no longer trading links. Any questions? What's that? Do I practice what I preach? Check it out: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/traffic-team.html
