I find these policy pages a tad tedious, but a necessity. They add weight to your website (when was the last time you saw policy pages on a spammy scraper site?). More importantly, they immediately let visitors know where you stand on various issues.

I’m surprised, but delighted to see that I’m already getting inbound links, as well as search engine hits. You may remember that I started writing about links, mainly because the marvelous HitTail reported that I’d been found by a search for hosting links. HitTail suggested that I write more about it, and I did.

Another fan of HitTail picked up on my post and linked back to me, noting:

Hittail not only saves you time, but also helps drive people to your website, and what’s better than that!?

That’s the great thing about WordPress, it builds an automatic hosting links web site. It’s not quite perfect though. It likes to add the “rel=nofollow” condition to outbound links. I don’t, for reasons I’ll explain when I install a plugin that gets round this very easily.

Until then, if you want to know more about building or running a successful hosting links web site campaign, or tell me your opinions, comment below or via my Contact Page

Many webmasters fall into the trap of trying to build as many links as they can. A common way to do this is to search for links or add url, or similar, together with the keyword or keyphrase that you want a link from (or want to exchange links with).

I describe this as a trap because what you can easily end up with is a collection of inbound links that give you no traffic, no search engine value, and might even lower your search engine rankings.

Now this is not really a webmaster hosting issue, and I will cover it in more detail on my web management site, but webmasters do need to be aware of the potential risks.

Before I talk about those risks, I must explain why I am writing about hosting links today. The reasons are very important for any business web host.

Last week I described the simple process of installing HitTail code. Though there are many methods for tracking how visitors find your website (known as referrers), HitTail is the best. It automatically builds and analyzes a referrer database. Normally, you would have to maintain your own logs, compare them with your site content and produce a report of suggested topics for new articles (or new keywords that suit existing articles).

HitTail produces this list for you, saving you massive amounts of time. If you are working on your own site, just add more content around the suggested phrases, or amend existing content to add more keywords. If you are managing the site for a client or employer, just pass the list on, and earn yourself a raise.

HitTail suggested I needed some content about hosting links. So here it is.

If you are building links through directories and similar sites, avoid the ones with low page rank. The easiest way to do this is to install SEO for Firefox, which shows the page rank for Google and Yahoo search engine results. If you are not using FireFox, I highly recommend that you use it. You can still use your existing browser after you install it.

The best way to add links is through forming relationships with other quality sites in a related subject. You should have a linking policy on your site, to guide people who want to link to you, and inform them how you link to other sites.

Do not build links pages – build quality content where external links add value by reinforcing, explaining, or extending the points you make.

If you want to know more about hosting links, add your comments below or email me using my Contact Page.