Creating a Link to Us Page for Your Web Site

Most webmasters are very aware of the value of having quality links from relevant, on-topic links from well regarded, high traffic web sites pointing to their own site. Professional webmasters will always provide linking graphics, instructions and sample text to those webmasters willing to link to them. The text you use in your recommended linking instructions will very often be cut and pasted without changes and this allows careful choice in linking text to help build link relevancy.

What follows is a standard part of a serious linking campaign, Instructions for setting up a "Link to us" page from your own web site. If you wish, you can cut and paste from this article.

There is a little trick to providing the HTML code for your visitors to see on your page which requires some coding slight of hand. Due to the nature of code, it is meant to be invisible and making it show up as code on a web page requires the following:

Those < brackets > that define HTML to a web browser make the contents within them disappear, so you must use code that defines a bracket, rather than using the bracket itself. That code is < for < the left-facing bracket and > for the > right-facing bracket. So in order to make the HTML show up on an HTML web page, you must use < and > in place of all of those brackets in order for them to show up on screen.

All of those brackets have been represented in green text on the page to help you be able to make more sense of the code visually.

Choose "View" and then "Page Source" from your browser menu. This will let you see the code necessary to display code in a web browser.

I recommend using a background color in the area you've created to display your HTML to separate it from the rest of the page. Here's the code necessary to make a gray background, single-celled table to display your linking code on a web page:

<table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="371" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr>
<td>
<

Your linking code would go here

</td>
</tr>
</table>

Using "comment" tags to show the start and finish of your links.

Comment tags are designed to allow you to create instructions or comments in HTML that don't show up in a browser. A comment tag is meant to be invisible too, so you will need to use those < and > characters to make THEM visible as well.

<!-- SearchEngineOptimism Link END -->

will show up in a browser as



and when copied from your web page and pasted into their web page HTML by your visitor, they will become invisible code used in their HTML source. The easiest link to provide is a text link and it can be used in email as well as on a web page. Tbe following is the text we provide at SearchEngineOptimism:

<table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="371" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2">
<tr>
<td>
<center> <!-- SearchEngineOptimism Text Link START -->
<A HREF="http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top">
SearchEngineOptimism 101<a/> offers an entertaining and easy Search Engine
optimization tutorial to increase your business VISIBLE on the web!<a/>
<!-- SearchEngineOptimism Text Link END -->
</center>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
This appears on a web page as follows:

< !-- SearchEngineOptimism Text Link START -- >
<A HREF="http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top">
SearchEngineOptimism<a/> offers an entertaining and easy Search Engine
Optimization tutorial to increase your business VISIBILITY
on the web!<a/>
< !-- SearchEngineOptimism Text Link END -- >

Note the TARGET="top" in the code? This insures that if your link is used in a framed site, that the resulting page will break out of the frameset.

Displaying a banner or graphic for visitor cut and paste

Clearly this could get difficult showing much HTML code as text, but let's look at how to show a graphic on your page as well. It is a preferred method of linking for some site owners and should be one or your options on a good linking campaign with allowances for different banner sizes, shapes and colors to match differing webmaster tastes and page layout preferences.

<table bgcolor="#CCCCCC" width="499" border="1" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="475">

<!-- SearchEngineOptimism Link START -->

<A HREF="http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top">
<CENTER>
<BR>
</A>
<CENTER>
<IMG SRC="searchengineoptimism.gif" width="468" height="60" alt="Wanna Be Seen? Let SearchEngineOptimism show you how to gain visibility for your business online!>
</center>
<A HREF="http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top">
Search Engine tutorial about gaining visibility on the web!</a>
</FONT>
</CENTER>

<!-- SearchEngineOptimism Link END -->

</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</table>

This appears as on YOUR web page as:

<CENTER>
<A HREF="http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top">


<IMG SRC="searchengineoptimism.gif" width="468" height="60" alt="Let SearchEngineOptimism show you how to gain visibility for your business online!"> </A> 

<A HREF="http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/" TARGET="_top"> Search Engine Optimization tutorial about gaining visibility online</a> </CENTER>

You must then provide a copy of any images you are offering as linking graphics to download and save from your page.

<table width="499" border="1" cellpadding="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<tr>
<td width="475">
<center>
<font size="3" face="arial, helvetica">
<b>468X60 "Wanna Be Seen?" banner


<p>

<a href="http://searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/">
<img src="searchengineoptimism.gif" width="468" height="60" alt="Search Engine Optimization tutorial about gaining visibility online" border="0">
</a> 
<a href="http://www.Searchengineoptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/">
<font size="2">Search
Engine Optimization </font>
<font size="3" face="arial, helvetica">
</font>
</a>
<font size="3" face="arial, helvetica">
<a href="http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/">
<font size="2">Tutorial
</font>
</a>
about gaining visibility online
</font>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</table>

This appears on the page as the example below shows:

468X60 "Wanna Be Seen?" banner

Search Engine Optimization Tutorial about gaining visibility online

Provide instructions to the novice webmaster as to the selection and saving of any graphic image when you provide logos, banners or graphics to link to your site.

To save any of the images to your hard drive press your right mouse button (Mac users hold down your mouse button and a menu will pop up) click on the option to "save this image" select a drive and/or directory on your computer and you've got it! Then cut and paste to your page the appropriate HTML code from below the image you choose.

The importance of setting up a linking page on your site can't be underestimated when it comes to gaining that all-important traffic to your site. It really is quite simple to do, no matter how difficult it is to explain!

Good luck with your linking campaign!