Often when your listing your site somewhere, one thing your asked is to put a link back to them on your site, another common request is to link exchange, where they will place your link on their site and in return, you display theirs on yours

“Hmmmm” I hear you thinking, “that’s ok, but why would I want to promote other sites on mine” and it is indeed a good question, and also there is a good answer hence the article, Search engines love this kind of mutual linking more commonly known as reciprocal linking to help gauge your popularity

Google amongst others use a special link analysis system to rank web pages amongst their other systems, so the more links you have pointing at you the higher you rank, which is why despite the worries its ok to promote other sites

Another benefit of this scheme is it also works for the directories benefit, which helps them get higher, as they get higher, your more likely to be spotted on there, and around it goes

“Ok” you say “lets get linking”

Before you go rushing off to dominate the world with back links a few things you may wish to consider

• Are the links relevant? Just linking to random site can actually bring the value of the links down, so try and keep them relevant for your site
• Where is your link going to be placed on their site? Some webmasters have page after page of links so yours will never be found
• And how many links are too many? If yours is one of say 400 is it really serving any purpose, the higher up a page you are the more it will be considered a valid link

There is also the problem of doing the link exchange then a few months down the line, your link disappears off their site, so your link back is one way, again highly valued by search engines, but why should you help them, if they wont help you, so be prepared to site down for a while every month or so and check all your back links

“Your site isn’t in the top ten of Google for your chosen keywords” so the email told me, it then goes on to offer to rectify the situation for $99.99 plus the most complicated pricing structure for extras i have ever seen,
but before you start to panic and throw good money away lets get some understanding of what keywords are.

The meaning of keywords in this context, is the way of describing what a user is searching for, which relates to the email above,

According to that email, my chosen keywords are not bringing results, well im sorry but I don’t believe in telepathy, so how could they possibly know what my keywords are in the first place, so lets not write a cheque just yet, a good site designer will work with you to identify your key words, and write your site accordingly

first thing i was asked by a client yesterday, then she asked me if i would like a coffee, ok so about as back to front as something i would do, but it still got me thinking how best is page rank explained

so here it is in as few words as possible, my slant on page rank:

With over 22 billion webpages on the web right now  (yes i counted them ) google felt they needed a way to decide importance hence page rank was born,
 
if you think of page rank as a vote system and every link to your site as a vote, thats essentialy the pagerank system in action, ie the more pages voting for your site, the more important you are in googles eyes, there is also the fact thatthe more important (higher pr) of the site linking to you, decides how important that vote is for you

as well as bragging about how important google thinks your site is, another reason for pagerank is the fact it is one of the deciding factors of where your positioned in search engines, so next time you think of link exchanges, keep google pagerank in mind

Here we intend to doccument development, gossip and generaly fill the web with usless info, like all good bloggers