Tuesday, November 11, 2008

How to Drive Traffic Through Reciprocal Link Building

In the SEO business, reciprocal link building gives good rankings if the sites are relevant or related to both topic/subject of both sites. It is an effective way to drive traffic to your site and you will also gain higher rankings with other related websites as long as you have an updated site with great content and significant information.

Link exchange will result if you have set a topnotch site with interesting content and other related information, this will in turn help others who want to exchange links with you for an added internet exposure.

Few notes on Reciprocal Link Building

* Make sure that you are linked to relevant sites meaning you both have the same subject matter and at the same time all the links are also related to each other.

* It's more about quality than quantity. In reciprocal link building, be on the look out for quality sites, linking to more and more sites not really related to your site is not advisable.

* This is a long and sometimes frustrating process because you still have to check if the sites have agreed on link exchange and regularly track down if the link to your site is still present on the other's website.

* Some webmasters may turn down your link and replace it with another link. If that's the case, take their link off your site also as this can give them good search engine rankings as one way linking and your website may lose.

* Examine the other site link pages, are they indexed and visited by google? If the site has no follow through or are hidden from those called robots, this will do you no good, it can even damage your ranking.

* When requesting for a link exchange, consider the links that are displayed/linked to the other's site, all the links should be relevant to your website. Also, the site should not have many broken links from other sites.

*Keep the number of links on that page at a minimum amount, if the page has 40 or more links then don't waste your time there anymore.

* You can decide however if you want to have a separate link page, this will depend on the size of the site and what your topic is all about.

Be extra careful in the reciprocal link building process, make sure that all the links are relevant and all the links contained in other's website are also related. Bear in mind also that not all webmasters are willing to exchange links, some webmasters do not allow link exchange or if they allow it, double check if your link exists on their link pages. Sometimes, webmasters do a naughty trick of hiding links after they've agreed on a link exchange.

Follow the link exchange rules. The site that you are exchanging links with should exist in major search engines and has good traffic ranking (Alexa is an effective site to keep track on rankings and traffic). Check regularly, let's say every month if your link is still in the site, some webmasters also have this practice of removing other links in their sites.

Reciprocal linking is a good and free way of achieving high website ranking but you should still monitor once in a while, after the link exchange don't stop there continue to check the status of your links and site rankings.

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