2. Offer A Link - Most sites won't just give out a link for nothing in return. Have a link to their site setup and then email them asking for an exchange. Even go as far as to give them URL of where their link is located. This basically just makes offer more serious because you already have a link setup.

3. Be Selective - You shouldn't just fire off an email to every website you find asking for a link exchange. Be selective based on importance of your site. If you have a large site that has been around a while, you can be more selective with your linking. You just want to be sure that you aren't wasting your time with sites that will benefit greatly from your link, but won't do much for you at all.

4. Mini Yahoo! - When I created my links page, I had in my mind a picture of a small directory. Yahoo uses actual people to decide where and if a site gets added. Although my link page is obviously much smaller than Yahoo, I try to keep same idea. I set up a page with different categories that relate to my site. This makes your links page professional and also offers another free service for my visitors to use. They can use my links page as a targeted directory where they can easily find specific, relevant information.

Best of luck to you,

JC Anderl www.Redlionbooks.com, JC@Redlionbooks.com

Visit my site or email me if you have any questions about marketing or website promotion.

Then along came click tracking and link popularity. Click tracking is another topic in its own right, so that won't be covered right now, but basis of link popularity can be explained in one sentence: The more sites that provide quality links to yours, better. It's not really that simple, because there are different kinds of links and linking methods that affect ranking, but for an introductory article, it'll do just fine.

Basically, algorithms, or rules, that search engines use favor those sites that have a large number of quality links pointing toward them. You can think of it as a popularity contest. Page A has more links pointing toward it, so therefore it must be a more useful page than page B, which has no links pointing toward it. Because of this, building links with other sites is simply one of most effective forms of promotion for your site.