How should I set up a links page?

I have been submitting my site, URL to directories and have been listed in 35 so far. Initially, being inexperienced, I hesitated to exchange links but now feel that this is an obvious next step.

My plan was to have navigation buttons, "Link Directory" and "Link to Us", on the home page. However, when I visit other sites including some owned by experienced members of this forum, I sometimes find it rather hard to find the location of their links.

Why are the links virtually hidden? Are they only there to be picked up by search engines' web crawlers rather than by real visitors to the websites. Any advice would be appreciated.

Regards
Bruce

if you don't want to link to other website, or you don't want to promote a website, you won't waste your time to build such a link page

your site still doesn't have PageRank

There are various reasons links pages are 'virtually hidden', one is that it was added after the main site design was done, so the new section has been put in where it wouldn't disrupt the overall design. Another is people don't want visitors leaving their sites through their links pages as soon as they arrive, so you have to dig a bit to find them.

However, another reason can be that the Google Page Rank of pages depends partly on how deep they are within the website. So if your home page is PR 4, the pages it links to within the site are PR 3, then the ones they link to are PR 2 (sometimes PR 1.)

Giving links out to other sites appears to dilute your own Page Rank a little for every link given, so to minimise the effect of linking out, it might be that people are burying their links page so it has a low PR as the spiders know you have to travel down several links to get to it. In that case, linking out from a PR 1 page dilutes your own Page Rank less than linking from a PR 3 page. Therefore, burying the links page several links deep might mean you get a good link in, but give a weak link back.

I must admit, I'm not completely sure the scenario I outline here will work this way, but from the way I read about PR it would seem to work this way, so it could be a reason for burying your links page.