You need to cultivate and establish your partnerships with other sites to enable growth. Trying to do everything in an insular manner by relying on one method (for example “pay per click”) is certain to end your hopes of building a successful website prematurely. It’s essential that you seek out like minded businesses and work with them to satisfy your customer.

It’s unlikely that you will have all of necessary requirements in place to satisfy every customer, so just as in high street, it makes sense to partner with other businesses that can provide missing components to overall solution.

Viewed in this way it makes complete sense to seek links with related sites.

For example. A site that specialises in tailored suits would be in a particularly niche market. Saville row tailors are much in demand these days but who would they partner with online?

Traditional linking strategies would have you seeking out similar tailors, maybe from other parts of country so that you were not in direct competition.

However, thinking laterally, it makes complete sense that someone doing a search on Google for “tailor” would want to see other tailor related sites so that they could compare services.

So an improved linking strategy would be to provide links to related services. For example, one of most common reasons for getting a new suit is a wedding. So wedding organisers and marquee companies would be good to approach. High class catering services and wedding limousine companies would be other good avenues to explore.

The strategy should be to link with partners who will actually be able to provide a service to your website visitors rather than just linking to a site because you can. As well as value of link in your popularity stakes you will also benefit from increased traffic that related links provide.

In next article I examine some practical methods you can use to gain link popularity and traffic

Tony Cooper is Internet marketing manager at

Linking strategy number six. Use your “anchor text” wisely. 

If you take anything away at all from this article then you should know this.

Search engines and Google in particular place a high level of importance on text in your link. It’s one of most powerful and yet most overlooked part of any linking strategy.

Take this text which a customer could use for their link exchange text:

A: Celtic design studio, we produce handmade Celtic rings and jewellery.

And compare with this:

B: Celtic jewellery, Celtic design studio produce handmade Celtic rings and jewellery.

Which would you use?

If you chose example A then you are on path to search engine wilderness. You are only using half of your linking power that you have available.

If you chose example B then you are well on way to dominating your market sector!

How can such a simple contextual change make such a huge difference to your linking campaign?

It’s to do with your keyword research and way that link is presented. Here is how it works:

Taking Google as everybody’s favourite example, we know that a link from site A to site B counts as a vote for that site (B), which means that it must be popular. In turn a link from site C which is an industry portal to site B means that it must be even more popular because site C considers it to be so and is already an important site itself.

Next we examine text in link itself. In first example we have “Celtic design studio” as text displaying in our link. This means that votes from our two linking sites are saying “this site is a good resource for Celtic design studio”.

However in our second example we have “Celtic jewellery” as link or “anchor text” and so our linking sites are now saying “this site is a good resource for Celtic jewellery”!

Does penny drop for you?

Now, this is where keyword research comes into play. If you choose your anchor text unwisely then it could take you forever to play catch up with your competitors. If they have been gaining links for several years then you have a lot of catch up to do. However by choosing an alternative keyword phrase that is not so competitive you can swing link strategy in your favour.

Suffice to say that only one or two inbound links with your keywords in your anchor text can make you rank right up with leaders – that’s how powerful it is!

Make sure you incorporate full power of your linking text into your link exchange strategy.