ron_ron - 9:41 am on May 21, 2010 (gmt 0)

Let say for example you are in the air ticket reservations business. More often than not, someone who needs an air ticket also needs a hotel. So in the real world, an air ticket reservation site has a bona fide reason for exchanging links with a hotel booking site. But how would G look at it?

If your only concern is G, the Lord of the Internet, should a hotel site only link with other hotel sites in order to have focused keywords? Or, is G smart enough to figure out that air tickets and hotel reservations are related?

Lets look at it another way. Let say you have a hotel booking site that specializes in hotels in the Toronto area. Assume that you are trying to rank for Toronto Hotels. Does that mean that you would be better off only exchanging links with hotel sites whose websites had 'Toronto Hotels' as their main keyword density?

Now you could concentrate on that, trying to get as focused as possible. But you would probably have to settle for some pretty mediocre sites in order to do so. If you expand your universe to include site that have keyword rich text like New York Hotels, Paris Hotels, etc you could have a better chance of getting better quality links. And you could get many more links too. You could even expand your universe to the entire travel industry spectrum. You could have stuff like travel to China, safaris, sightseeing in Rome, etc. But the keywords aren't as focused. So where do you draw the line?

Of course you could have those sites linking to you use anchor tags like Toronto Hotels and Hotels in Toronto, etc. but the pages that your inbound links would be on would usually not have that sort of keywords as it main keywords.

DISCLAIMER: I am not in the hotel business. :)