A links page is a place to point to other sites that may be of interest to your visitors, but this page also plays an important secondary role - search engine optimization.

When someone searches the web, Google has to consider thousands of sites to decide which ones to include in the results and where to include them. Google starts by looking for the search keywords within the headline, along with the site's text and meta tags. So if you want your site to come up when someone searches on your city and "total knee replacement," those words need to be included throughout your site. The more key words the better.

But keep in mind that there are likely quite a few competing sites that have your city name and "total knee replacement" on their pages, and Google has to decide who gets those prized top positions.

To do this, Google checks to see how many sites have linked to each site in the list. Google's theory is that a site that has been linked to from 20 other sites is more relevant than a site that has only been linked to by two sites. More people have found the first site worth linking to, so Google lists it above the site with fewer incoming links.

Here's where your links page comes in. You now have a place to "trade" links. Link to companies you work with and ask them to link back to you. This is a win for both sites, because by linking to each other, both sites will raise their search engine profiles.

So we at Swarm highly recommend that you not only use this page, but that you trade some links!