How many times have you heard A anchor has to have this PR or that PR to be of value or backlink only to relevant sites and a myriad of other Expert advice on the assessment of worth of links and reciprocal links?

As a webmaster myself I grew increasingly weary of hearing how important my links were in the eyes of a search engine. Now this may sound brave or stupid of me but believe me when I say it is neither. I could not give a FLYING HOOT how important Google, Yahoo, MSN or the Gurus think my sites are and I do not care what my PR is.

Am I completely nuts? Not at all, you see my sites have plenty of visitors without me needing to worry about search engines. Sure I can always utilize more who may not ? But I am making a very nice living and without a big branding budget or spending hours and hours on SEO.

Why do I say that I do not care how important search engines think my sites are? Because in 6 decades as a webmaster and webhost, Google, Yahoo or MSN have NEVER signed up for any of my mailing lists, they have NEVER bought a merchandise from me and they have NEVER joined as a member of any of my sites.

The opinion that matters to me is the opinion of my visitors. It is PEOPLE who buy my products and services and not search engines. If they like my site they can even recommend it to their friends. That is what I care about!

It is nothing more than logical common sense therefore that if I want PEOPLE to visit my address I positive need to get links to my sites in front of REAL PEOPLE! Even Google themselves say Build your web page for visitors not search engines

As webmasters we all positive need to stop the stinking linking thinking and focus on what the REAL worth of a link is. This is not rocket science, links are valuable if they bring visitors period! One variable, one consideration its really simple.

In the last few months with all the SEO hype and advice links directories have disappeared to the bottom of pages, featured only with tiny writing links. Or worse they have been renamed resources or partners in the hope they will not be interesting to surfers.

Whats the point in that? Come on think logically, again is Google bot going to sign up? NO! Is Google bot going to buy? NO! So what is the point in going to the measure and effort of putting your hyperlink on another page if only a bot might find it?

Oh thats right! It will improve your search engine rankings and bring you thousands of visitors. WILL IT? Are you at the top of all the major search engines for several popular keywords and grasping thousands of visitors a day from them? If you are congratulations! I hope you are still there when the search engines change their algorithms next month.

My guess is if you are reading this article you are not at the top of the search engines, but you are still hiding your links away and following the advice of the SEO world, and praying for that holy grail of a first page search engine placement.

Why webmasters hide their links is beyond me completely. What exactly are they scared of? That someone might leave their page and go to another page? I have news for you, thats what internet users do, they go from site to site its how the web works.

I have more news for you, EVERY address of your address at the top right has a little X that will take persons from your website . EVERY site of your internet page top left has a home button that will take many people away from your internet page . And those two things you can do NOTHING about unless you are the creator of Internet Explorer, Firefox or all the other web browsers.

Wait! I have even more news, the one SURE THING about ALL visitors to your website is that they ARE leaving. I do not care how hot your web page is, I dont care how nice your merchandise or service is. I am not staying on your web page for ever and neither is anyone else not even you!

These days I personally choose (and believe me I learned this the hard path by giving up a lot of traffic to follow the advice of the SEO Gurus) to put my links directory right there in my main address , and on EVERY page where it might be seen easily by my visitors. You see as human leave my page I do have a choice where to send them. By hiding my hyperlink section I would by default send ALL of them back to Google or Yahoo or what ever search engine they use. I choose to send SOME of them to other web sites , websites who like me appreciate the free of cost visitors and in return send me some of their departing visitors.

If you are hiding away your links contruct no error you ARE sending your departing visitors back to search engines. Search engines who give you NOTHING in return. Maybe you even pay them to sell now thats sensible send them all your visitors free of charge and pay for some of theirs.

If you were to show your anchor section clearly, and I have a link on your web page there is a incredibly successful chance they can come to me instead. And IF you show your backlink section clearly I will certainly return that favor and send you some of my departing visitors.

How I get visitors to my sites is nothing new, it is not some AMAZING new visitors system, it doesnt cost anything and it certainly doesnt require a lot of maintenance once set up. It is based on how the web has always worked, links and persons .

That has never changed, my guess is you are just not utilizing that method any more. I made the identical bad choice and gave it up for a while too. By hiding your links you are reducing the number of visitors you get now, in the hope of thousands of visitors later. Personally Id rather have 300 visitors a day from my links now than a Maybe of 20,000 a day some measure in the distant future.

You might take or leave this article as you please. If you are an SEO Guru or expert please do not e-mail me I do not want to hear from you. SEO doesnt work apart from for a tiny percentage of web sites . Even if it does it offers only temporary results at best. I have been there and done that. The FACT is even IF I get to the top of the search engines after a lot of hard work or financial investment you CAN NOT guarantee I will stay there. These days Google and other search engines are changing the roadway they order their results far too regularly to contruct SEO a valid investment of my measure or money.

A dating site I once owned was at number 3 in Google for term free dating after some very long hard work optimizing the address . Then in an instant the visitors stopped when Google changed their algorithms in the famous Florida update and left my site on page 56 of the results. It is simply NOT a sizeably efficient business sense to invest measure or money in results over which you have no control.

These days I have hundreds of visible links on other sites and unless Google might shut down the internet there is NOTHING they can do or change that will affect the visitors from those links. To me at least that makes a LOT more sense for my business and is a much better investment of my measure .

I will tell all of you reading this article that I am currently spending a LOT of instant working with webmasters AND web users to stop this rot. You see I re-discovered something very simple and very effective that works. It benefits all my sites AND internet users as a whole, so you could be sure I am going to share those findings not only with other webmasters but with surfers too.

I have written e-books and articles aimed at both groups of humans, and have little armies of both types growing in numbers daily. So pretty soon those surfers will understand about your hidden links (if you are hiding them) and make use of them anyway. The sad thing is if you dont fix your Stinking Linking Thinking and bring your links directory out of the bowels of your page, the chances are you will not get a backlink on the websites of webmasters who are showing their links and once again starting to work together instead of competing for a first page search engine listing.

The choice my friend is yours. You might link for visitors or you might hyperlink for the Maybe some day in the future first address listing that you have NO control over.

My advice is simple, invest in a decent links code to set up your links directory properly and get active exchanging links with sites who are SHOWING not hiding their link directories. They are out there if you look for them and they are growing in number.

Forget site relevance, how do you understand what is relevant to a visitor? Do you understand all your visitors personally? Do you have some mind reading program I do not understand about? Just because they are on your widget page does not mean they are not a keen fisherman and not interested in a fishing site.

Link to any quality page that will build your link accessible to humans. Give your departing visitors choice of sites, they are interested in more than one thing! A varied links directory is a very useful resource to your visitors as they leave.

The advice from Google to link to relevant sites has always puzzled me. How useful would Google be if it followed its own advice and only linked to other search engines and those search engines only linked to other search engines? Does their advice really build sense?

By acquiring in just 3 new visible links a day on other sites, will mean over 1000 links pointing to your website by the finish of a year, links that might and will be found by real persons . Does that sound like hard work to you? 3 new links a day? It takes much less thinking about than algorithms, keyword density, alt tags, meta tags, trends and SEO. It also produces results and leaves you costless to concentrate on the person who matter, your visitors!

Finally one last bit of news for you. If you exchange quality visible links with other sites that PEOPLE might find, guess who else will find them? Thats right Google, Yahoo and MSN so you might well do better in search engines as a result, but whether you do or not you WILL get visitors.

In closing please do not get me wrong. I am not against search engines at all! I make use of Google daily, it is a very useful tool. What I AM against is giving them complete control over my sites traffic. What I am also against is the dreams being sold by the SEO world, and thats what they are dreams with BIG odds of success and temporary results.

Understand this! Search engines do not like SEO either. They want to deliver accurate results to surfers not the best optimized pages. If search engines do not deliver accurate results surfers stop using them and they do not get to sell the selling that makes them their profit.

That is why Google and other engines are constantly changing their algorithms to combat SEO tricks. SEO has just become too complicated and too temporary in its results to contruct it viable.

Dump your stinking linking thinking persons , initial working with and not competing with other sites and initial grasping visited.