Links
Modernsearch engines analyze which web sites are linking to your website.
Notall web site links are equal. One link from a very popular website is morevaluable than a hundred links from obscure personal pages (although 100 linksfrom obscure web pages is still a lot better than no incoming links at all).
Thereare bad incoming links. The search engines are pretty good at spotting “linkfarms” (web sites that exist just to give links to other web sites, usually fora fee).
Havinga link from a link farm is really bad for your web site. The major searchengines will immediately count these links against you and if you have enoughlinks from link farms or even one link from a really notorious link farm youmay find that your web site ends up getting banned.
Itis a good idea to trade links with other websites that are related to yourfield. Sending out e-mails to people with popular websites is usually justgoing to create problems (you might get banned for being a spammer). But as yousocialize and do business with other people who are in the same field with you,you can ask them in person if they might be willing to trade links with you.
Webrings aren’t as useful as they were in the 1990s, but placing yourself on amonitored web ring can be useful. Monitored means that a human actually approveseach new web site added to the web ring.
Also,it can be useful to add one or two really good outgoing links to each of yourweb pages. The search engines will notice that you are linking to web sitesthat they already know are good websites and will give you a slight boost inratings for this.
And,of course, make sure that your outgoing links stay current. The search egnineswill downgrade you for having links that don’t work anymore. A skilled webmaster can create an automated web bot that can periodically check youroutgoing links and let you know if any of them stop working.