I saw a site today that had only 4 visible links on its home page. 3 of those links were text links and linked to other pages within same web site. Therefore there was only 1 link to a different site. Is this site operating profitably?

I'm really not sure but information on site was very good. It got me thinking though.

Everyone is talking these days about link popularity and getting as many people to link to your site. Often this means you have to give reciprocal links back to them. The theory goes that better your link popularity better you will rank in search engines.

Well some people appear to be taking this to extremes. Suddenly you have got 473 links to other sites all sprayed across your web pages. Your visitors are bombarded with banners and text links on totally different subjects. They do not know what to click on next. Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

Sure you may jump up a couple of places in search engine results but is it really worth it?

With so many links these sites are not focussed.

What is answer?

Why not have fewer links. This might mean more profits.

1. Informational 2. Sales

Of course, that is a gross exaggeration and over generalizes landscape of Internet, but it will be useful for this article. We want to talk about how you can take any site you have and create a sister site of other type in order to improve your traffic, sales and mission. First, let's define these types of sites a little more and give some examples.

1. Informational

This is classic content or free information site. It includes hobby sites, huge communities like Yahoo, search engines, discussion forums, news sites, how-to sites and a vast majority of Internet in general.

2. Sales

This can be a classic e-commerce site sells something directly. It can describe a product/service and provide a way to provide payment directly on site. The famous sites in this category include Amazon, Orbitz, and Ebay. The less famous sites sell a vast variety of kind of merchandise that used to be sold via direct postal mail campaigns, catalogs, etc.

It can also include a more subtle type of sales site. Everyone was warned in last decade that you had better be "on net" or you would be out of business. Most organizations have taken that advice. Almost every corporation, non-profit organization, government agency, church and school now have a website. When many of these organizations created their website, they realized they had nothing to sell directly, nor did their true mission include providing a lot of free information content about their topic. Most of these sites provide information about their organization, press releases, methods to contact various departments, information about upcoming events, and product/service information (albeit, not for purpose of direct sales). The end result is that these sites are there to promote organization's mission. They are really sales sites in that way.

Now that we've over generalized these two categories of websites, let's admit that almost every website has some element of each. I've owned sites that have completely morphed from one type to another with lots of hybrid during morphing process. I've come to discover though that it is often not a good idea to mix these up. Let's talk about why.

Let's say you have a pure information site. You are really into widgets as a hobby and you create a massive site with a popular discussion forum, lots of articles, pictures, how-to information, a massive resource directory of other widget sites, product reviews, etc. Your site is #1 place people go to find out about anything to do with widgets. In fact, your site is so popular that your hosting bill is now way over your hobby budget, but this is a labor of love; right? Many of us have been here. The obvious answer is to mix in a bit of e-commerce to offset bills. Maybe you add some widget banners or text links. Maybe you put an affiliate link to Amazon after your review of a book about Widgets. Maybe you even install a shopping cart and start buying widgets wholesale and selling them directly on your site. You even dream of someday making a living doing what you love: maintaining your site about widgets.