Why your site needs links Part 2

Before you consider joining a link farm in order to build up your incoming link, consider the fact that a link farm is nothing more than a form of spam. The only difference from email spam is that the link farm spams search engines instead of emails.

If you are planning on building a solid search engine optimization program, you should be planning for the long term. It is tempting to grab what you can in terms of getting the links that will move your site up the popularity pole. However, the immediate gain might cost you down the road.

Google is not a big fan of link farms because they are designed primarily to get around the PageRank system that Google uses. Because of this, Google has ways and means of determining if a link farm exists.

While it can be a challenge for the search engine to figure out if your links come from a legitimate source or from a link, when a link farm is uncovered, the search engine can penalize the link and its clients by banning them. Being banned is not worth the risk.

The best places to find reciprocal links is to search for sites that are relevant to your site. What you are looking for is a site that you think is worthwhile that is willing to take a look at your site and decide that your site is just as good as theirs.

The first thing you need to do in order to find reciprocal partners is to make a list of the kinds of sites you think visitors to your site will be interested in. The point is to make as long a list as possible of related topics.

The next step is to make a list of the type of sites that might be interested in linking back to you. Perhaps some of the types of sites are the same as yours and they might not want to link back to you because their visitors can find the same thing on both sites. The other site might not want to take a chance of losing customers to you.

When you look at both lists, you will see which type of sites made it to both lists. Begin with the list of these sites that made it to both lists and start searching online for actual sites that match your new combined list.