By Clare Lawrence 29th September 2003 Clare is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.

What is linking? Linking involves linking your websitesite to another with aim increasing traffic and directing web visitors to other interesting content.

How can link popularity be improved?

The following are all worth considering

1) Trade links with other Web sites.

Make sure that Web sites you trade links with have same target audience, but not direct competition.

2) Pay to get your link on other Web sites.

3)Fair trading; present their link in same way they present your link.

4) Use links from other sites to give people something extra when they visit your Web site.

5) Submit an article to a web site that would be interested in publishing it on their site. Just have them hyperlink your Web site address at bottom of your article.

6)Use your associate program to get a link on other Web sites. Tell Web site owner he or she could make extra income if they link to your site.

If content is king, then linking is queen that shares his throne. We have all heard about adding content to your site to give search engines fodder to consume. But secret to luring search engines is links to your site. Today's search engines look very carefully and critically at who is linking to you, and what it is that they are saying about you. A link from a leader in your industry carries a lot of weight and means that your site is important. Two links from industry leaders means your site is even more important. 100 links from random web sites, from industries you are not even related with, means almost nothing. Thus, getting links is only start; important thing is getting good links from quality web sites.

Why do links matter?

Since arrival of Google and their PageRank, search engines have put a lot of weight on links to a site. There used to be simple ways to get good rankings: Meta tags, titles, keyword density, etc… Today, things have become more complex, with search engines now using a very complicated algorithm that involves:

•links to your site, •what is written in those links, •who is linking to site that links to yours, •what are keyphrases used in those links, •what is quality of site that is linking to yours, •how many other links does that site have, •how many links out (and to what sites) does your site have, •and other such criteria.

To use a rather appetizing analogy, these new criteria are added to stew that is your site, along with quality and quantity of content. Left to simmer on worldwide web, this stew is then eaten up by search engines depending on how well your site matches aforementioned criteria. Put differently, king and queen must join together to turn your site into a number one result.

How do we get links?