Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is considered by many people the most effective way to increase traffic to your website. You often get hits from the web sites that you have exchanged your links with, and reciprocal linking also helps boost your search engine rankings.

What is a reciprocal link?

A reciprocal link is a link to a website that carries a similar link back to your own website.

A reciprocal link is a common thread between you and another website owner. You both likely share similar websites and content, and you are o'kay with the possibility of a viewer leaving your site to take a look at your linking partner's site.

What a reciprocal link is not...

A reciprocal link is not a cure all! Many times webmasters have a ton of links. The problem is that many of those links are broken or out of date. I will share a resource to help you find those broken links in a minute. But first you need to find sites to link to!

Tip for Finding Quality Links

Google might not dominate the search engine world like it did last year, but it's still a big player and can account for a lot of your traffic. It's no secret that acquiring PageRank is a big part of doing well with Google. I've personally seen my own pages receive huge jumps in traffic after PageRank updates. By now, you probably know PageRank comes from the number of incoming links to your web site; the higher the PageRank of the incoming links, the more PageRank your site will receive.

The problem with link building campaigns is you rarely get out of them what you put in. You're doing pretty good if you get responses from one in four people you contact. In order to make things simpler, people often join traffic exchange programs, or simply post forms on their page and wait for link partners to come to them.

The problem with these methods is you often get offers from sites you don't particularly want to link with. Maybe they're selling something you'd rather not be associated with, or their site is brand-new and sloppily put together, and it's not going to be much of a boost to your PageRank. Now, I'm not saying you should never link to a new site, because today's PR-nothing could be tomorrow's PR 6 or 7. Rather, I just want to offer a tip to help you capitalize on your link hunting time.

Step 1: Do a Google search for your target keywords.

Step 2: Visit the highest ranking sites, and use Google Toolbar to check their back links.

Step 3: Ask for links from the sites that appear in the back links.

Simple, hunh? What this does for you is thus: gets you in contact with people who are willing to exchange links with sites in your keyword area, and perhaps more importantly, gets you in contact with sites that have a high enough PageRank to appear in Google's back links (typically, only PageRank 4 sites and above appear here).

This should help you find the links that can truly help you, and it should cut down on your wasted link hunting time. Now, don't you have some links to find?

Do Link Exchanges Really Work?

Should link exchanges be used? What are link exchanges? Do they really work? These are just a few questions that most webmasters come across at a link exchange. Link exchanges are sites that help webmasters find link partners for the benefit of traffic. Link exchanges are one of those that help you get link partners for traffic. They are used by some to get more link popularity to increase their ranking in the search engines like Yahoo! or Google, which both use to calculate web pages ranking in the search engine results.

Over the years link exchanges have been criticized by both webmasters and search engines, even have been targeted by search engines. They have been called link farms and link scams. The truth is that they are not link farms, link farms are network of sites that each link to the other site for the benefit of high ranking on the search engines and most link exchanges are not so called link scams. How can you tell the difference between non-link scams and link scams? There are a few things that you should look at closely at link exchanges.

1. Do you have to upload a web page or file to your site?
2. Are they in the search engines?
3. Are most member's sites spamming?
4. Does the link exchange look professional?

If any of these are truth about the link exchange you should not join and leave fast as you came. It is important to look at this very careful because you are investing in your site and this could crush your site's future.

Link exchanges have proved to be successful both for getting you good ranking and getting more traffic to your web site. Link exchanges are one of the most powerful tools you can have by your companies side, but like all things they have a down side because they can be abused and used the wrong way.