A little history...

When I began my website several years ago, it started with just one feature and a few pages. Back then, it was a thrill to know that a few people were visiting my site each day. But as I worked harder on the site, adding more and more internal pages and features, I became disappointed that more people weren't coming.

So, I started to work on ways to increase my website traffic, and this has been modestly successful. Even during periods of change in the behavior of search engines, there has been lots of regular traffic and repeat visitors, usually over 2000 unique visitors each day and currently much higher.

I used to have a large collection of links outgoing to other sites. But for various reasons, this had to be removed and re-thought.

I am now gradually reestablishing a modest link collection, but with more focus than before. In the past, most sites that I linked to, benefited by receiving at least a few visitors from my site each day. This is a good incentive for receiving a link from my site.

My site is one of the "authority" sites on body mass index and ideal weight. If you link to my site, it can benefit you indirectly, on theme- and authority-based search engines. "Authority" sites become authorities by linking to other authorities (among other criteria). Email me for references, if you want to learn more.

I will link to an external site if it has significant content related to my site themes, which are: body mass index, ideal weight, breast cancer, and height and weight charts. I prefer to link to specific pages that have those keywords somewhere in the text, and hopefully in the <title> or a heading like <h2>.

And I love to receive incoming links that have my keywords appearing in the link anchor text, and the linking page has my keywords in nearby text, a preceding heading and title. I appreciate incoming links to my health calculator pages.

So go ahead and create a good page that I can link to. The links I provide will have that external page's keywords in the link text, and in some plain text nearby. Email me to discuss it. If it is awkward to edit your page to add my keywords, perhaps I can suggest an alternative. We can learn from each other and cooperate to benefit our sites and our visitors.

I decline linking requests to unrelated sites. If this applies to your site, I apologize in advance. Sites promoting diet supplements primarily are very hard to link to. I prefer to swap links with sites offering health-profession advice, services/information, but not just selling products.

What about "competitors"? This is interesting. There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of websites that offer simple calculators of Body Mass Index and Ideal Weight. Why would they link to my site, or visa versa? They should, because it benefits us both. I've learned a lot about surfers paths during the past few years. Most surfers who use a health calculator will press the BACK button afterward. Only 1% to 2% of visitors will explore the site any further. So really, a link to an external site doesn't significantly affect your traffic (because it comes back). Furthermore, my site isn't about commercial sales. It only competes to provide good scientific information to as many people as possible.

Thanks for reading my stuff...

Sincerely,
Steven B. Halls, MD

 

Back to my plinks page. or Back to the halls.md index page of body weight calculators.