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For many years web pundits claim that trading links with other web sites helps boost ratings, & maybe it does. BUT there is a new kid on the block - Web Reviewing - where web surfers tell it as it’s about web sites they visit.

For every 1 great web site there’re thousands of bad & poor web sites & some hundreds of pretty awful ones - where is your site now, or more important where do you want it to be?

Lets compares link building

Link building can involve a lot of work applying for link trades with other web sites and/or checking & approving sites, & whilst programs or web sites can automate the process this can be costly in monthly fees.

Placement of your link can be way, way down on your link trade partners site & the chance of getting noticed can be poor. Whilst it is true this is another link to your site but having 3,000 web sites connected to yours can mean little in real audience terms.

Checking to see if your link partner still has you listed is also time consuming, so ensure you get good value with the entire link trade process.

True links can mean better rating with search engines but again the problem exists there’re now so many web sites it is impossible for all but a few sites to get decent ratings unless they have some completely unique feature or theme.

So what’s web reviewing all about?

Web reviewing has been around for ages but is perhaps better known as a GUEST BOOK, a place on your web site where people can leave comments about your site. Trouble is it only is useful for your own site visitors & rarely read.

Spammers love guest books & loads of rubbish is regularly posted there & webmasters need to constantly review entries or moderate everything.

Growing in popularity is the web review site which offers web masters the chance to add their site & this allows web surfers to find their site in the various top level categories to suit the sites theme & content. Clever anti spam features stop a lot of the unwanted posts & reviews so ensuring clean, genuines enteries as far as possible.

WebMasters can then link to their central web review & be assured that site vistors reviews can be added by both their own site visitors or visitors to the main central review site.

Review sites are normally free & are regularly indexed by search engines to ensure reviews get good coverage. All it takes is the time to add the site to the central index & a few lines of code on your web site where you want to highlight to site vistors the review option.

The choice to use one or the other or both link building & site reviews rests with each webmaster, we all need audience & any new method that is free can not actually be ignored. Time will tell if web reviewing will beat link building as the new web standard for site promotion.

Maurice Clarke is a UK Internet consultant & founding owner of http://www.mywebreviews.net offering webmasters the chance to get their web site reviewed by visitors to his site & yours - a neat service to boost web site traffic.

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