Is your linking strategy really working to your advantage? Learn how to optimize your approach and grow your site traffic with insight from leading experts, including linking strategist Eric Ward, social-media whiz Amber Naslund, Netconcepts President and CEO Stephan Spencer, and Blue Fountain Media CEO Gabriel Shaoolian.

Linking strategy is about doing whatever it takes—buying, swapping, going after as many reciprocals as possible—to maximize your presence on the vast expanse that is the World Wide Web, all of which will ultimately lead to increased site traffic and improved search engine rank, right?

Wrong.

Sure, years ago, it was beneficial to appear all over the map, but things have definitely evolved. Web surfers have better things to do than aimlessly click on any link that crosses their paths; besides, off-target traffic never does much for the bottom line anyway.

And search engines? They, too, have become more sophisticated, determining rank in part through the quality and context of each link and penalizing sites that participate in link farms, create irrelevant links pages, or engage in other dubious ploys.

"The best links to have are those that are naturally occurring and earned by merit," observes Eric Ward, a linking-strategy consultant, speaker, and coach who has helped the likes of Amazon.com, Microsoft.com, Yahoo.com, and PBS.org optimize their approaches.

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