Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal Linking has two main benefits:

1. Increases your visitors by getting your URL on web pages all over the internet
2. Increases your visitors by getting you listed in a higher position on search engines

By getting your link displayed on other website's Link directories around the world you are increasing the number of paths leading back to your websites, which in turn will increase the number of visitors to your site.

A side affect of getting lots of links to your site is that you increase the chances of getting your web page listed on one of the first few pages of search results returned by search engines. This is because most search engines take into account the number of backlinks to your website when deciding how to position your site.

If you are reading up on the subject of search engine positioning, you may be familiar with the term "PR", or "Page Rank". Page Rank is a number between 1 and 10 that measures the "importance" of a web page, measured by the number of incoming links to that page. Many internet marketeers are obsessed by page rank and will only link to other web pages if they have a high page rank. In addition to this many people may spend hours optimizing their meta tags and keywords to try and ensure that they get a top position in Google, or some other search engine. The problem with this is that the top search engines are changing their algorithms all the time and it is almost impossible for most of us to keep up with this. If you concentrate all your efforts on this you may find that you lose all your traffic from a particular search engine as soon as they change their ranking algorithm.

My advice is to forget Page Rank and concentrate instead on building up a good set of reciprocal links. Instead of focusing on the PageRank icon on your Google Toolbar, willing it to move each day, why not focus your efforts on building up a good set of links and measure your success by taking delight in the increased number of visitors to your website.

OK, now that we've got that covered it's time to start finding links! You can do this by just by surfing the internet and looking for other pages that have a links directory, following the links in each of the pages links directories as you go. If you find a site that you like and you think that your visitors would be interested too, then you need to submit a link request, either using the form provided on the webpage or by emailing the webmasters for these sites to ask for a link.

You can also find a list of Website Link Exchange Programs & Tools here.

Once you start getting a few link partners, keeping track of them all and continuously updating your web pages with all the new links, whilst checking that your link is still own their website can be quite a bit of work. I use some software called Link Machine to do all the hard work for me. You can try out Link Machine for free here

If you would like to exchange links with me, please visit my Link Partner page.

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