What happens when another webmaster “stumbles” upon your site and finds it valuable or interesting for their site’s visitors? How will they find YOUR desired link information to put up the link to you?
One of the biggest mistakes I see webmasters make is not having an information page containing their link details.
While optimizing my sites, I’ve come across a number of sites that did not have any information about how to link to them. Worse, their site did not have a proper title tag (overstuffed with multiple keywords or containing their site name only) and did not have a meta description tag to use. Some even used their meta description tag to include a bunch of keywords instead of providing a useful description of their site. Others even suggested that webmasters figure it out themselves! Checking the title tag and the meta description tag are the simplest alternatives people can use to create your desired link information if none is found on your visible pages.
If webmasters decide to link to you, they will either use:
When a webmaster leaves this small but crucial portion of the site undone, others who come across the site and like to set up a link to it will undoubtedly link in a variety of ways. They may use keywords in the link text that you don’t want to optimize for or keywords in the link text that no one searches for.
Rather than leave this linking information to chance, why not create an information page offering the basic details that any webmaster would want to have? Let’s face it: People are lazy. By placing all the information at their fingertips, ready for the taking, you make their task of linking to you easier and by suggesting YOUR information to them, you are also more likely to get those webmasters to place links the way you would want them to.
Sure, it will not always happen the way you want to but it sure doesn’t hurt to get a few bonuses along the way while optimizing a website. People will visit your website and those who do may decide to link to you.
If you have a large content site and want links pointing to the inner pages also instead of just the homepage, you could even suggest different link information for the ones you are working on or intend to optimize for in the future.
The basic and essential link information any site must have:
An even better type of link is having the anchor text surrounded by descriptive keyword rich text that makes the link look more natural.
It’s important to note that your site description is not written with promotional and subjective language like “…greatest site on earth…”, or “…buy from the best…”, etc. These are not necessary and often turns people who are considering putting a link to you off. If the webmaster is putting your link in the context of an article, for example, he would also be the one to decide what good or bad things to say about your site. And if the link information is to be used in a link trade, the link will likely not be seen by too many people except the search engine spiders because it will only appear in a directory filled will other links.
So, encourage other webmasters to link the right way to you. Give them all the information they need and you’ll get better links as a result. Leave nothing to chance. You’ll probably get more links too as the percentage who probably decide that it was too much trouble to find how to link to you and abandon your site will start to put up the links you want.