Reciprocal Linking

Reciprocal linking is one of the best ways to increase your website’s/blog’s traffic and best of all, it’s free! It has three main benefits:

1. Get’s your URL on webpages all over the internet, and so increases your visitors.

2. Get’s you listed in higher positions on search engines, thus also further increases your visitors.

3. Plays a major role in increasing your pagerank (explained below), which helps a lot in making your site/blog recognizable and driving traffic to it.

When you have your link displayed in other websites’ directories, all over the internet, you are increasing the number of paths leading back to your website/blog, which in turn increases the number of visitors to your site.

When a website gets lots of links that lead to it, it increases the chances of it’s web-pages getting listed on one of the first few pages of search results returned by search engines…that is because search engines take into consideration the number of backlinks to your website when deciding how to position your site.

You may have already heard of the term “PR”, or “Page Rank”. Page Rank is a number between 1 and 10 that is put to measure the *importance* of a web page, usually measured by the number of incoming links to that page. PR has become an obsession of many internet marketers who are only willing to link to other sites if they have high PRs.Also many people may spend hours optimizing their websites’ meta tags and keywords trying to get a top position in Google, or some other search engine. The main problem with this is that the top search engines are changing their methods/algorithms all the time and it is almost impossible for most of us to keep up with this. One shouldn’t concentrate ALL their efforts on this, as to not lose some traffic from a particular search engine, if it changes it’s algorithms.

I would advise forgetting about Page Rank and instead focusing on building a good set of reciprocal links. Visit Honest Links for a great explanation of why you should do this and not be obsessed with PR.

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

A service you might be interested in, is 1000 High Quality Back Links To Your Site. A very good way to boost your search engine’s ranking and get high quality links to your site.

If you’d like to exchange links with me, drop me a line here or post a comment.