Too many website owners believe that they should not accept or trade links with their competitors when such offers occur. This is often a very shortsighted approach. The Internet and search engines have changed a lot of the old tactics of marketing and advertising.

Usually, you would put a link that you are trading with another website on a Links Page, Resources Page, Partners Page, or whatever you might call it. Often the link to this page is at the bottom of your homepage in smaller text, or on some other page of the website. When someone comes to your site after finding you in a search engine for the term they searched for, it is highly unlikely that they will be looking for your Links Page; they will be seeing if you site offers them what they have been searching for. If they have found what they are looking for and contact you, or buy your product, you win! If they don’t, they may go back to the search engine’s listings to look for another site. (The search engine will note how long that person stayed on your site and whether they came back to look for another site in the results. If the search engine sees an overwhelming number of visitors return to the search engine, they might reconsider your site’s value for that search term.) On the other hand, if the visitor stays on your site (often because they find it pleasing and easy to use) they my look at your Links Page and find a possibly valuable link to the site of one of your competitors.

So the visitor was going to leave your site anyway. Better they leave through your site. The search engine will not know that the person left, and you may have made a friend by being a good resource.

The few people who may find a link to your competitor (that they may very well have found in the search engine anyway) is very much compensated for by the increase in your rankings in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that the reciprocal link on your competitor’s site gave you.

Remember, whether it is a link to a competitor, or not, the reciprocal links should only be exchanged with quality, relevant, websites. Never use link farms, or pay for links!

If you are creating a new domain, of course you do not have that option of age, but you can help yourself by registering it for a longer period of time than one year. 5 to 10 years would be suggested. The reason is that many people who use websites to spam the search engines will register a domain for as short a time as possible, knowing that the effective life of the the website is short. (Once the search engines catch on that it is a spamming site, it will lose its ranking and no longer be of any use to the spammer, who will then shut it down and start over again with a new short-lived domain and spam site. Some spammers have been know to take advantage of the “30 day-money back guarantee” type domain registrations to create dozens of spamming sites, closing them down at 30 days and getting their money back.

By the way, we recommend www.register4less.com for the best in domain registration services.

As the owner of a new website, you can expect to do or pay for a lot more writing of content, quality inbound link building, and attracting visitors and links through blogs, social sites, and other Web 2.0 techniques.

Content: You may have heard the expression, “Content is king.” This is true, the more content you have on your website, the more fodder there is for the search engines to chew on; the more you are able to emphasize your key search words and terms and the more likely you are to be considered an “authority” and thus attract links from other websites.

Link Building: In bound links from other websites that are older, have more Page Rank, are of a related subject, and are respected by the search engines, are the best way to increase your rankings in the search engines. It is a lot of work, but well worth it. Google is becoming a lot more discriminatory on how it places value on links from one site to another. So one good quality in bound link, may be worth dozens of low quality extraneous links. Paid links are a no-no. Some directories charge a fee to review your site before inclusion–those are OK, but going to a link farm and paying to have 500 links created to your site is a waste of time. The search engines will most likely just ignore them. Trading links is OK as long as you do it with a site that is related in subject to your site.

Blogging: If you create a blog that you contribute to regularly (daily or weekly**), you will have the opportunity to create good fresh relevant content and links to interior pages on your site. If your blog posts are good and interesting, you may create comments on other people’s blogs and sites, that in return creates more in bound links.

Web 2.0: Then there are all the social sites, Youtube, Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Flikr, etc. Any content you can create on these sites can enhance the visibility, traffic, and links to your site.

All of these techniques take a great deal of effort. But remember, there are people out there doing these things, and they are your competitors in both the search engines and in visitors. So let’s all get to work.

This earnest and eager woman did all that she thought was necessary, but  did not know enough about  SEO and web marketing to get her site noticed. I now highly recommend to anyone who has plans to create an e-commerce website themselves to spend a few months studying SEO. Go to the SEO online forums everyday and read all the post. This is where you will find other people like yourself who are looking for advice and knowledge from people who are in that field. At first it will be confusing and perhaps frustrating, but after a month the learning curve will soften and you will “see the light”. You will say, “Oh, now I get it.” Once you do, it will make sense, and you can start building your site.