Every website  and blog owner knows, or soon learns, that links are a great way to build traffic and search engine rankings. And most realise that incoming and outgoing links are both important parts of the equation.

But what makes a good link? How do you want to be presented on other sites and blogs when they are linking to you?

Obviously, you can’t always control how people link to you – you often don’t know about links until after they are established – but if you are prepared, you can increase your chances of getting good links, and offer good ones in return.

Many people assume a banner link (that is, an image of your business is linked to you rather than text) is the best option. This is not really true. People looking at the site may notice a banner sooner than text, of course, but don’t always respond more to a picture than to a few well written sentences. And not everyone realises that a banner can be clicked on as a link – they look for underlined text as a link. What is more important though, is that search engines can’t read images so any text in the banner itself is not picked up by a search engine.

So a text link is often more effective. But even then, some text links are better than others. For instance, a descriptive link to my article on formatting letters is more effective than just a link to Word Constructions as it gives the search engines and readers more information.

As you read my blog and website, you will notice that I try to include a description in every link to add more value to you and those I link to. Is this something you will try now?

Happy writing!