Following the previous article on “good” links to obtain, I mentioned briefly about topical sites linking to another relevant site.
What is relevancy?
Does it mean a real estate agent (or choose your industry) should only link to other real estate agents (or of the same industry)?
Just like traditional advertising, you’ll want to target the market you’re dealing with laser-like precision.
In this case, a real estate agent deals with the subject of real estate. Ask yourself the questions: “What would my prospect or client like to see on my site?” or “What would my prospects or clients consider as useful resources?”
Links that would benefit visitors to a real estate agent could include: mortgage brokers, pest control companies, contractors, pool cleaners, home inspectors, credit reporting agencies, etc. You get the idea.
These links are not just confined to text links for link popularity. They include banner ads, affiliate products/services or even pay-per-lead links on your site.
Relevancy can also be maintained even though it comes from a seemingly unrelated site. Take for example a web hosting company and a printer providing printing services. As a web hosting company, common links to be found would be related to domain name registration, web design, web promotion, etc.
But to a printer? What’s the connection?
The key is in the page the link resides. If a link is placed on a categorically relevant links page to the printer (printing services or B2B resources, or related topic etc), this link becomes a relevant and useful link to the printer. The same applies for the printer’s web page pointing to the web hosting company.
An even better link would be one to the printer coming from a specific, tightly focused category like Digital Printing, Offset Printing, Print on Demand, etc which tends to be more descriptive about the site and contains other similar links and descriptions in the links pages.
Generally speaking, though, a link in a categorically relevant page is sufficient.
Links found on competitors back-links (by using the built in search engine tools like “link:www.anysite.com” on Google, Yahoo, and MSN) are also categorically relevant.
Relevancy is an important factor to take into consideration when trading, exchanging, buying one-way links, something which we will cover in more detail later.