Your linking program will be a hard working employee of your business. It will bring you targeted traffic directly from your links, and in time it will boost your ranking in the search engines and bring you even more traffic. This will be no cost targeted traffic, the best king of traffic.

One way links, are of course the prize, but reciprocal links should be a big part of your program as well. Reciprocal links are much easier to obtain, but they do take some effort as well.

There does seem to be an effort on the Internet by many big marketers to de-value recriprocal links. What are they trying to sell you? All links are good if they are well thought out. By this, I mean, link to sites that have value.

Starting out with a new website it may be harder to link to sites with high PR. Look at the site and see what it has to offer before you use this alone as a linking criteria. That low PR site may bloom in the future and bring you many visitors and search engine clout.

Asses the site for value. Is it a site with visitor value? Is it a site the search engines are going to like? Staying away from sites with scraped content, pages and pages of links instead of content and sites that are offensive in some way is prudent.

When you start out find a good link management program. It will save you a lot of time and grief in the long run. Managing links once you have them, is a big long lasting project. Investing a little money here will save you time and stress down the line. Better to start with a good program, and not have to re-do your whole linking program later.

Links deserve a good link management program

Following are the minimum features you should look for in a link management program. Displaying categories and restricting the number of links per page makes your link program more attractive to linking partners.

1. The ability to add links easily

2. The ability to designate how many links per page

3. The ability to easily add or delete categories

4. The ability to check periodically to be sure your linking partner is still linking to your website.

5. The ability to delete links when necessary.

6. Backup Backup Backup. I can't stress this enough. Your links are valuable and hard won. Don't risk losing them. I learned this the hard way. Make sure it has a backup feature. Don't depend soley on your web host for backup!

Join a reciprocal linking program. This will speed up the process. Everyone involved is looking for links so you don't have to beat them over the head to get them. And you'll be happy and surprised to find partners who even have decent page rank and are willing to exchange with a new site.

Value your links by not hiding your links page. Call it whatever you want as long as it is clear what it is. Link partners, link Resources etc. This is better than just links. Look at other sites for ideas. Put the link to your links page where it can easily be found, at the very least on your site's homepage.

Potential link partners want to see your link page so don't be ashamed of it by hiding it or using print so faded it is difficult to see. Professional designers love to do this. It may be prettier, but not effective.

Find more information about linking, and link programs at my site. There are many programs out there and with more features than I have listed for managing links, and some good ones at no cost to you. And good, free link exchange programs.