This is second in a series of three articles showing you how to find a suitable linking strategy for your website and put it to work for you.

Link strategy number one: The Front Page Link Swap.

The most important page on your site is naturally home page and as this is page that is most often pointed to by internal and external links this is page that carries most “linking power”. This is more usually called “page rank” (Google) or “Yahoo Web rank” (Yahoo).

Important note: If you are promoting an e-book, guide, tutorial or you are using a similar marketing technique then you should make your links come back to promotional page and not your home page. As this is page that you will want to go out and compete for you in search engines.

The way that linking algorithms is of course a closely guarded secret, however it’s known that more links that you have on a page less “linking power” is assigned to each link on page. Thus a links page with 75 links on it is going to give little benefit in link boost and also a small amount of traffic, it is after all competing with 74 other links.

This is where front page link swap is such a powerful strategy.

By swapping a link from your homepage with a link from another site of equal or greater linking power you are getting a far bigger return in terms of both link value and traffic than you would for exchanging links on a buried links page.

The downside is that to find willing and co operative webmasters to do exchange is very time consuming.

If you’ve been sitting and wondering why traffic to your website is trickling in to your website ever so slowly then this article is intended to help you add some much needed oomph to your marketing campaign by using a linking strategy.

You may have heard that linking to other websites can benefit your website. Here are three main reasons:

Traffic . By linking to sites with similar themes to your own you can develop a hub of traffic that will always remain constant. There’s an old saying that “a link lasts for all time” and it’s essentially true. There are short termers, shysters and hucksters that try to tilt playing field but ultimately they are biggest losers in link strategy game.

Once links have been placed they generally remain for years to come, feeding your site with a steady stream of reliable traffic. In fact it often happens that some domains which have been given up by their previous owners have thousands of links still pointing to them after many, many years. It may be a slog in beginning to set up a linking exchange program but you will be rewarded with quality traffic which lasts well into future.

Popularity. When search engines look at how highly to rank a site on their search engine results pages (serps) they follow an in house algorithm which determines where your site gets placed in results page. On page factors such as page titles, headings, Meta tags etc all have a bearing on how your page gets ranked but also important is “popularity” of your website.

The popularity of your site is determined by links that point to your site. Not just any old links either. The type and quality of link is also under scrutiny here and so there is no point rushing off and trying to get as many links as possible, you need to track down quality links to your site to gain best benefit from a linking campaign.