Link Structure Strategy

If you have two or three sites, don't link them all together from every page on every site, especially if the other sites are sub-domains. Search engines don't like it if someone is trying to boost up the page popularity this way; especially, Google can detect it and penalize your site. So if you have three sites link them triangularly so there are no back links between two sites.

Link Structure Theory:

99% of links on your Home Page should be to your internal sub-pages only. Put the links to your other sites each by themselves on their own page, with some of the aforementioned content. Put any links to other sites which are not yours on a page with each other (but no more than a 20 links on each page, so split them up if you have to). And don't label this page "Links", "Useful Links", "Helpful Links", etc. Try not to use the words "reciprocal, links" too much on your site. Every page should have a link back to your home page and perhaps to some of your other sub-pages as well.

Dixon Jones, of Receptional recommends
"do not employ (as a general rule) a linking strategy designed for search engines, rather for REAL traffic. The SE bonus is great, but it's better to think of the quality of the link as a vehicle to get a human to your site, not a spider. The search engines will then find your links stronger than your competitors', because they are!" You'll find this, along with many more linking strategies in: 131 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies By Robin Nobles, Eric Ward, and John Alexander
http://www.digital-page-author-software.com/link_popularity_article.htm

Back links:

The most valuable links are those from pages with a page rank of 4 or higher. Despite the number of links already achieved, additional links from sites which have substantial page rank of their own should be sought on a continuing basis. Submit your site to the directories, as the biggest directories have a quite high page rank. Open Directory is the best free directory to be listed in. http://dmoz.org
Or Yahoo
http://dir.yahoo.com
(Click on "Suggest a Site" at the top)

http://www.submitexpress.com/linkpop - This tool will show you how many other sites are linking to you. 

How to ask for a link:

1) Compliment them on their site.
2) Suggest your site as one their visitors might find useful. Usually a site has a email address displayed .

Buying links:

A growing trend is to approach a webmaster of a high PR site and offer to pay for a link. Google has no way of determining whether money changed hands, and the link will be as valuable as an organic one.

A user-friendly design and links from relevant sources which are not merely on a whole page full of links are more valuable in your search engine rank placement.

Don't link to prohibited websites such as prescription drug, illegal content pages, or online gambling sites. Links that are of true benefit to your visitors are always allowed. It's a great strategy for making your site more useful. Some webmasters use a directory to organize their links. That's also allowed; in fact, it's encouraged. I've always said
that a website is judged by the company it keeps. It's evident that Google's backpedaling a bit on the 'links as votes' philosophy, and therefore, it's again time to link without considering the search engines.

bob --- Wednesday, December 29 2004, 19:43

mistake that most webmasters make is to have a menu on the left side of a website. Since search engines primarily focus on the first 100 words of a website, a left side menu is a misuse of valuable space. Instead of doing this, you should have your title, description and web copy within the first 100 words of your site. An easy way to do this is to have your menu on the right instead of the standard left side. But, since the left menu is commonplace, you can also choose to put your first 100 words above the left menu, so this text will be the first thing read on your website.

BUT, the menu on the left side is the information design tradition and it will not confuse the users