How to get reciprocal links
Reciprocal links help you in two ways
Reciprocal links are arranged
when two web sites agree to link to each other.
Reciprocal links are also known as "link swaps", "link exchanges" and
"link partners".
A common misspelling is "reciprical links".
Reciprocal links help you in two ways:
1. They increase your web site
traffic, from people who click on the links.
2. Reciprocal links also play a
major role in boosting your rankings in search engines.
Warning: Late in 2005, Google's
Matt Cutts made it clear that it's possible to "overdo" reciprocal links.
Getting good, solid, reciprocal links should be
part of your links strategy, not
your total marketing strategy.
When ranking sites, the major search engines take into account the number
and quality of the sites that link to you.
Persuading good quality, relevant sites to link to you can be tedious,
time-consuming and frustrating. Here are some tips to increase your
chances of success.
One way to find link partners is to do searches in major search engines
such as Google and Yahoo! to find sites which complement yours but are not
direct competitors.
Many sites also link to direct competitors, figuring that the benefits
outweigh any disadvantages.
Examine their links pages
A refinement of this strategy is to visit your competitors' sites and
complementary sites and examine their links pages or resources pages.
The sites you'll find there are potential reciprocal links partners. They
should be linking to you.
Now visit THEIR links pages and examine them, and so on down the chain.
You should end up with a long list of good sites with which to exchange
links.
How to set up reciprocal links
 | Find GOOD QUALITY, complementary sites. |
| Place a link to them on your site. |
| Only AFTER you've placed a link to them, email the owner of the site
a short, friendly note. Address him or her by name. (If the name isn't
on the site, you may be able to find it at
www.whois.sc)
|
| Genuinely praise something on the site. If you can't find something
worth praising, delete the site from your list. |
| Tell the web site owner you've linked to their site, giving them the
URL of the page where you've place your link. |
| Ask for a link back to your site, suggesting a page where the link
would be appropriate. |
| Three weeks later, if there's been no reply, send a brief, polite
reminder. It's easy for emails to be lost or overlooked. |
| Use the phone and/or snail mail. A link from a good site is a very
valuable thing. If you can't get noticed by email, consider trying a
phone call or posting a letter. They're more expensive but also more
likely to attract the answer you want. |
| Keep an alphabetical record of sites you've linked to and requested
links from. You need to know who you've contacted and who you haven't.
|
Want links from pages with high
PageRank?
To boost their PageRank, some webmasters concentrate on getting links only
from sites that have high PageRank. (If we all did this, no new site would
ever get reciprocal links.)
If you want to try this approach,
PRsearch is a
useful free search tool to use. It gives you Google search results PLUS
PageRank.
You type in a key phrase and can quickly see the PageRank of pages
optimized for that phrase.
You can also click on the number beside the words "inbound links" and you
may find more sites with high PageRank.
Really serious ways of getting links
You can arrange newsletter article exchanges with other newsletter
publishers in your niche, preferably with newsletters which are archived
online.
Some webmasters also arrange "article swaps". You write an article to be
published on their website and they write an article for your site. This
gives you an in-context link, which is
much more effective than a mere link on a links page.
Reciprocal links websites
You can search in Google for link exchange websites which publish directories
of website owners who actively exchange links with each other. As a
general rule, the easier and more automated link exchanging is, the more
risky it is that you'll be doing something which the search engines don't
like. You don't, for example, want to get involved in link farms which
link to totally unrelated websites.
Reciprocal linking tools
"If you're serious about getting more traffic and higher search engine
rankings, you'll need to develop a linking strategy for your website,"
says highly respected Internet marketer Ralph Wilson.
To facilitate getting reciprocal links, consider the software described in
Ralph's
Reciprocal Linking Tools report.
His 22-page report explains the functions of various types of reciprocal
link management software, divides them into three types, and provides
reviews and recommendations on best-of-breed software.
It includes brief reviews on Zeus, Arelis, LinksManager, Links4Trade, Hot
Links SQL, Linking101 Link Management Script, LinkManager Lite and Pro,
Duncan Carver's Link Management Assistant, and PowerLinks. Four of these
packages win the "Web Marketing Today Editor's Choice Award" for
excellence at a reasonable price.
You can rely on Ralph for carefully researched information you can trust.
Reciprocal Linking Tools costs only $8.95, or slightly more in printed
format. It's a small fee for peace of mind.
Three ways to save time
1. You can hire companies which
specialize in finding reciprocal links partners for you. This will
probably cost about $6 per link. Prices vary in different industries. Dirk
Johnson's
LinkStrategy is one company which provides this service.
2. Use the free SiteSell
Value Exchange. It's a very simple, fast, efficient way of exchanging
links with relevant sites.
The Value Exchange is very useful but isn't likely to find you all the
reciprocal links partners you need. In some industries, it may find you
only a small number of link partners. In others, it may find you several
hundred links partners. It's definitely worth joining -
especially so because it's free!
Join the free SiteSell Value Exchange - FREE
3.
Arelis software takes a lot of tedium out of finding reciprocal links
partners. For example, it has a great "Find Competitor Links" feature that
allows you to quickly find all web sites that link to your competitors.
Web sites that link to your competitors are sites that should link to you.
Arelis quickly locates these sites and helps you to contact them and ask
them to link to your site.
If they're already linking to similar sites, there's a good chance they'll
be willing to link to you.
You can also search for reciprocal links partners by keyword or keyword
phrase.
Arelis makes link management very simple and saves you a lot of time. It
also builds your link pages for you. You can customize the template to
match your site's style and no one will ever know you're using a link
management program.
Warning about SBI and Arelis
Here's a warning from a Site Build It user who also uses Arelis.
"If you upload pages created by Arelis (or any other pages for that matter)
to SBI, the links to external sites are replaced by redirected links,
presumably for tracking.
"What that does however is that it prevents you from passing any PageRank
to your link partners. Putting aside the debate whether PageRank is
important or not, many webmasters clearly believe it is important and
simply refuse reciprocating with sites that don't link to them is straight
HTML. Certainly that has been my experience.
"...the only way around this is to create all reciprocal links in SBI by
hand and forget about uploading pages from Arelis or any other reciprocal
management software."
SBI users can still use Arelis for a very powerful purpose - to find
potential link partners - and can add the links to their sites manually.
Arelis checks your links
Arelis also checks to see that your reciprocal links partners are still
linking to you - another really useful time-saver.
There's a free trial version. Highly recommended.
Download the free Arelis trial
Automate Link Exchange
I haven't tried this link management software, but it's getting some very
favorable reviews. It could be worth checking out:
Automate
Link Exchange
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