After reading so many articles about how important it is to get links to your website, you may wonder how it affects your ranking. You may even read about getting "bad" links and how they will hurt your web site. It is hard to know what is real and what has become a myth of the search engine world. I hope that my practical and real world experiences may help shed some light.

First of all let me say that links with the right keywords make all the difference. You need to decide what keywords you are going after on the search engines and ask that links use those keywords. Make sure you have a few choices and rotate them while trading links. This helps to give you a more natural link growth with search engines. Depending on your internet niche you may get good ranking within a month on MSN. That is a good gauge of how your links are being viewed (they are the fastest to show ranking). Plan ahead as to the keywords you want to rank well in, this does not happen overnight and will take some time.

My favorite debated area for rankings are the "bad" links. While there is no arguing that there is a "sand-box" that gets you no ranking on the whole Google search engine and may kill your PR ranking, it is from your own doing. Understand that any of the bad things that happen to sites are not from the webmaster being a victim. You can only hurt yourself ...so don't think you can hide keywords to match your background just to get noticed... old trick that really does not work. Please understand that if you hear of a "trick" to get ranked fast you may get black listed just as fast. To make this short understand that even if these "bad" sites link to you, you will not suffer. The search engines have to understand that you have no control over who links to you. You will not suffer because of another webmasters actions. (Or we could all pay to have a black listed site link to our competition) You can only suffer if you link to these sites.

There is no reason to link to every site without checking them out first. There is a very easy way to check the status of the other sites. Visit Google and get there free toolbar and visit their site. Watch the bar ... does it stay gray or does it turn white? If it shows green Link to them. If it stays gray don't link ... something is wrong. If white you are safe they may just be new. Understand that if you link to a new site with no page rank today they just may be a high ranking site later and you will only already have a link with them. Never forget that you were new once too.

So who do you want to link to? There is a weight of what links count more. One-way links count a lot (meaning you don't links back). Second is if they are of the same niche or industry. The key here is to know what they offer or are selling ... are there keywords like yours? While these are the best links to get don't forget the rest. There is nothing to say that trading links with a site that has nothing to do with your site does not matter or even to think that it will hurt you. This is a very common mistake. Take all the links you can get! I know I will get a lot of comments about this, but look at Adobe they hold the #1 rank for the key word "click here". I'm sure that most of their links don't come from sites that have anything to do with them.

Let me just say that links seem to carry the most weight as to your ranking on search engines. Make mulitipule link pages for your site that limits links to no more than 30 per page (look for the same in others). Get links that are like your own site when you can. Never turn away a link, even if they are not like you ... the weight they may hold in the future may just be better than your own. Always give time for links to take place and show on search engine index sites. The more links you have and the better they are, the more chance you have to get your home online business ranked faster.