Peter Da Vanzo wrote the following in a post on SEOBook.com titled “SEO Flows Through everything”.

Integrate SEO into all you do. Even sending out a bill is an opportunity to ask someone to engage with your site. And hopefully link to it.

Ask your friends, associates, suppliers and customers to link to you. Do the same for them. Create a personal link network of like-minded people and grow that network wider and wider. Think of it as a circle of trust.

Recently I was talking to a website owner about linking from their website to other people’s sites.

The person expressed fear that a link to another website will take potential visitors away from their site. They believed that this action will minimize the chance that they have to get value from the site visitor that they have, the old adage “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.

This attitude of referral selfishness is still very prevalent as an attitude among a large majority of smaller website owners. Unfortunately for them the very thing that they fear is what will help them improve their reach and conversion.

I like the way Peter expresses it as “A circle of trust”. If there is anything that I could recommend to a webmaster it is to find and trust other people in your industry that are trying to achieve the same thing you are. Work together. Don’t work against each other.