Infertility Home > Professionals > Business Mgt. > Web Site > Promotion

Promoting Your Web Site by Exchanging Links

Another option for promoting your infertility Web site is to find other infertility Web sites and offer to exchange links with them. In this situation no money changes hands. Here are two major advantages of exchanging links.

• Your Web site will probably receive some additional traffic from the external links.
    

• Search engines will rank your Web site higher if it is popular (i.e., there are lots of other Web sites with links pointing to your Web site). Link exchanges help make your site more popular.

Tips

• In order to maximize the possibility of another infertility site linking to your site, it helps if your site has lots of educational Web pages. The other site is more likely to want to point to your educational pages.
   

• When you request a link exchange, consider adding the following to your (email) request:
    

  • Include a personal comment about their site so that the site owner feels that you took an interest in their site.
     

  • Indicate the Web pages where you like them to add the link. If you can't find any such Web pages, then it's unlikely they will add a link to your site.
      

• A large infertility Web site may not wish to trade links with you. However, if you have a specific educational Web page that may fill an information hole in their Web site, they will be more likely to exchange links.
   

• This process can be very labor intensive and time consuming. You will need to email or call the Web site operator, make a proposal to exchange links, and then follow up to make sure the Web site operator added the correct link (and perhaps description) to your site. The Web site operator sometimes does this incorrectly and then follow-up action is needed. If you do this, then IHR suggests that you set up a method (e.g., updating a word processing table) to manage this process.
    

• An alternative to the labor intensive process of link exchange is to obtain a promotional listing from an infertility directory site.
    

• You can also review the Link Popularity list of tools.
   

• How Search Engines Use Link Analysis - Eric Ward has an article on link analysis. (Users may need to be Search Engine Watch members to view the article.)
   
• 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies - Article on Search Engine Watch site.