Well I find it time to speak again about linking as I have a couple of times in the past two years. I think I have gone the cycle and I think I have arrived.

What do we want linking to do for us and what can linking actually do for us?

Well we want it to get us traffic. Most of us think it can get us traffic two ways. One way we hope to get traffic is by making the search engines think we are good because of all the links to us. We are hoping that will rank us higher in those search engines.

All the SEO companies want to help us be on the FIRST PAGE of Google. Well with the billions of websites now and all the keywords maxed out can we all be on the first or second page? Of course not!

So, how much does it really matter where you rank in Google? Let me give you an example provided by David Notestine from Zeus link management programming. He will provide server logs to back up stats that show:

- they get 6000000 hits per month for Zeus

- about 20 of those hits are from search engines

- about 3 percent result from paid adwords (not profitable he says)

- the remainder are from hits from links on other websites

What should we really expect from our linking strategy. Lets get hits from links on other sites. Forget that other stuff about pleasing the Google Gods!

So why dont we all help each other with good linking practices? If you are going to link to me so that others can find my site, why in the hell dont you make it easy for those visitors to go from your home page to your link index? WHERE IS THE DAM Text to click on for links? If I cant find it to verify my link, then I know damn well that your site visitors wont find it or even look for it if its that hard to find. As you can see, this really irks me.

Secondly, for your link site to be useful to me, visitors need to find me or my product in that huge directory that we all are trying to develop. The best way to make it easy for searchers to find a link to a website or product is with a search utility installed and kept current on the page of that big link directory. Visitors can then search for a product, name or contact and get easy and immediate results.

The difference we see here is that a few little things like this will make linking work the way it should for ALL of us and not for just ten or twenty websites!