If you’ve read anything in the internet marketing arena while trying to promote your website, you’ve no doubt come across the advice that you need to get links to your website in order for it to do well in the search engines. I’m not here to tell you otherwise, only to point out that when someone gives you advice on getting links, don’t assume that any and all links are helpful or desirable. You need to learn to go after links that will give you the best results for the least amount of effort.
Years ago, in the early days of the internet, it was not uncommon for internet ‘gurus’ to council people to place links on FFA lists in order to get traffic. Besides these FFA lists, webmasters were encouraged to get links from classified ads, webrings, link farms and all manner of beasts like these. These links didn’t help the average user find useful information faster. In fact, if anything it made it more difficult for people to find what they were looking for.
Years ago search engines were simple by todays standards. Back then you could often achieve top ranking for a particular keyword by simply repeating these keywords over and...