Some of the search engines frown on this practice - so I would highly suggest just going to the big ones out there, submitting yourself - and let the others find you from there. 

I have followed the advice of other members here and elsewhere, and sought out sites which offer reciprocal links, in an attempt to climb the ratings. It's not easy finding them, and it seems that they all expect you to put a link on your site first to theirs, and then you have to wait 2 or 3 weeks for the reciprocal link back, which doesn't seem like fair play to me. Still, so far, I've managed to get 13 or so links back to my site which are live (I've checked them!) So why, when I check the link stats with Google webmaster tools, does it appear that the only links Google has found to my site are on this and one other forum where I've posted my url??

And when (if?) Google finds these hard to obtain links, will it help my ranking very much anyway?

Hi Mitch!
I haven't been around much lately because I have solved (mostly with your help) most of the problems I encountered on this journey. All, that is, except for how to get the site listed high enough in Google for anyone to actually notice it! It doesn't really matter too much, because I never started it with any great expectations, or with a need for it to become a commercially viable enterprise. It was just for my own amusement and knowledge, and in that respect, it has already been a huge success.
But boy, is it frustrating not to be able to improve on 67th place in Google! Apart from playing around with the content, adding the odd new photo etc., I seem to have run out of things to do with the site now. I shall have to come up with a new idea for another site, and start all over again, and see if I can do better.
By the way, 8 of the links I have obtained did come to me asking for an exchange - albeit all from one webmaster. But at least that's proof that someone can find my site!

Cheers 

The Gods of Google like to see links to your site from related (similar business) sites. However, they will smite you if they see you on "link farms" and other collections of unrelated links. If your line of "business" is information on town(s) and citie(s), it would be good to get links from other city, county, state, etc. sites, whether commercial or government-run. On the other hand, if you are linked to by a site which is nothing but a collection of unrelated links, or otherwise can't be justified as having something to do with your "business", at best that link will be ignored and at worst you'll be penalized.

Outbound links from you to other sites will do nothing for your search engine rankings, but might help them. Just make sure that they sooner or later link back to you. Does the HTML code you paste into your site include your site's URL, so they can generate a link back to you?

That ought to pass muster with Google (no penalty). My assumption is that at some point a real human looks over a site and manually "adjusts" a machine-generated list of keywords, and that list is used to compare (by machine) against other sites and decide if they're "related" enough. At least, that's what I'd guess that Google does. Maybe they're confident enough in their AI skills to do it all by computer (humans out of the loop) and the keywords just aren't matching up well enough. Remember too that Google (and possibly the other engines) are constantly changing their ranking systems as people learn how they work and starting "gaming" the system.


As I said, Google (and perhaps other search engines) will penalize you if it thinks your inbound links are coming from a junk (unrelated) site that's just trying to pump up search result rankings with lots of bogus links.


No, that's not what I was getting at. My suggestion was that if someone says, "paste this link code to my site into your site and in 21 days you will receive 100 inbound links in return" (sounds like a chain letter, doesn't it?), check to make sure that the link to them has a URL query string with something about you. A link like

<a href="http://www.theothersite.com">The Other Site</a>

may help them (if sites have similar business), but doesn't necessarily have anything to help them create a link back to you. On the other hand, if the resulting link is something like

<a href="http://www.theothersite.com/links.php?mysite=http://www.mysite.com&myarea=spain+city+torremolinos+...">The Other Site</a>

they have the information at hand to make a link back to you. (Yes, I know, some of the punctuation in the UQS needs to be escaped with %xx hex codes.) Now that I think about it, there might be other ways to accomplish this (HTTP REFERER?). At any rate, check them out after the promised length of time and see if they ever did get around to creating a link back to you. Be sure to "exercise" those links once or twice to make sure that they actually do get a hit from you (and get the information to make a link back).

Finally, don't forget to do all the other things that can lead to good rankings: important keywords in domain name, page titles, keyword and description meta tags, headers, body text, image alt and title attributes, etc. Text, not graphics! A spider has to be able to read everything and have it make sense. There's more to search engine rankings than just inbound links.

Keyword meta tags are currently out of favor with Google, due to past abuse, but may be useful to other search engines. It doesn't hurt to use one.

I don't know of any reason why a spider wouldn't notice descriptions and keywords on non-index pages. If you only care about getting your Home Page indexed, concentrate on that one. You can even suppress indexing of interior pages with the "noindex, nofollow" robot meta tag. If you want interior pages indexed too, give them the full keyword treatment. It would probably help to have a unique description and keyword set for each page.

Remember not to abuse SE spiders with keyword overload -- if you put in massively repeated keywords or no-show text (e.g., white text on white background), you may be discovered and penalized. Just make sure you honestly mention important keywords a few times in the text and headings and such.